Colour realism tattoo of a deer with large antlers bursting through torn skin on a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Deer emerging through torn skin on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A whitetail-style deer with a full set of antlers looks to the side from within a ripped opening, with its front legs and head emerging into view. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft highlights on the fur and antlers and dark shadows inside the tear. Warm browns and reds dominate the deer and the ragged edges of the skin, with purple and grey accents in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday. The hide came in from Hallam's yard wrapped in sacking, and when Mr Oakes cut the twine it shifted under my hands like something breathing. I told him to leave it on the rack until morning. He said he had never once in thirty years left a hide to sit overnight, and he went home to his tea.

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By Thursday the tear had opened along the flank, a ragged mouth the length of my forearm, and out of the dark behind it came a stag. It was no hide any longer. Its hooves rang on the cutting bench, its antlers scraped the lamp chain, and it looked at me the way the squire looks at the rent man, as if I were the one who had been caught.

I did not run. I fetched the blue chalk and drew a line where a stag's shoulder should end, and it stepped back into the rip as neatly as a coat on a hook. The edges pulled together into a seam the colour of rust. Next morning Mr Oakes found the bolt whole and the chalk line gone, and he never asked why I would no longer touch that rack.

I still keep a scrap of offcut in my apron pocket, warm even in January. When the church bell goes six, it lifts its head from the leather and listens down the lane for hounds that never came, and I stand very still until it lays its head back down.

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