Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a deer head inside an outlined triangle with roses and flowers, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer head and flowers in a triangle on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A deer's head, shown front-on with large ears, sits inside an outlined triangle with a rose and several flowers below it. The outlines are solid black, while the face, ears and neck are shaded with stippled dots. The tattoo is in black ink and grey shading, placed on the side of the torso.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Deer Fawn Triangle Flower Rose Hibiscus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was in the back room of the Plough, because the school hall had been sold for flats, and by ten the talk had worn round to the same thing it always did: the spring the fawn came down off Harrow Fell and stood in the playground. Nobody had believed Margaret Tully until the headmaster saw it too.

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Her mother had told her what to do, plainly. Walk the boundary of three fields, where the hedges meet in a point, and at each corner leave something that grows. A rose cutting at the first. A sprig of mallow at the second. At the third, a thread pulled from your own cardigan, buried so the deer would know whose ground it was. Margaret did all three, and the fawn came, and it looked at the children the way a teacher looks down a register before calling the names.

Forty years on, the three of them stood outside the pub with their coats undone, and Dennis Ashby said he had never slept properly since. Margaret laughed and told him the trick was simple. You did not chase the thing that looks back at you. You kept your own flowers growing and let it choose where to graze.

They walked the lane to the stile without speaking. In the field beyond, the grass lay flattened in a neat three-cornered shape, and at the point where the hedges met, a doe lifted her head, ears wide as paper, and waited for them to go home.