Black and grey tattoo of a deer head with branching antlers on the upper arm and shoulder, drawn in fine engraved-style linework.

Deer head on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wearing a white lace top shows a tattoo of a stag's head with a large branching rack of antlers on her upper arm near the shoulder. The image is cropped below the neck, so her face is not shown. The design uses fine stippled and hatched linework in black ink for shading on the face and neck, with no colour.

Shoulder Deer Stag Antler Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag had hung above the third-floor landing since before the war, and Mrs Pennock would not have it moved for anybody. Every Friday Nell climbed the stairs with a tin of beeswax and a cloth that smelled of vinegar, and every Friday she worked the dust out of those branching antlers one tine at a time, while the lodgers' boots knocked up and down the stairwell below her.

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It was the fine hatching on the neck that had caught her eye first, the way the shadow gathered under the jaw as if someone had breathed on the paper a thousand times and each breath had left a little grey. She asked Mr Vosper, who kept the coal shed and knew the history of every knot in the boards, who had drawn it. He said a man in Bristol had made the picture for an almanac, and that the head had come back to Saltcombe in a crate the winter the lifeboat crew lost two men off the point. Mrs Pennock had bought it at the sale and never once said why.

When the new owner from Leeds arrived in October with a van and a clipboard, he looked at the antlers and laughed and said they would fetch nothing at the auction in Exeter. Nell did not argue. She wrapped the head in an old bedsheet on the Sunday, tucked the bundle under her arm, and walked it along the front against a wind that pushed the spray over the railings like wet laundry.

The lifeboat house had a window that faced the open water. She propped the stag on the sill where the lamp could reach it, and the antlers threw long shadows across the boat rack, branching over the hulls like a second harbour. Out past the breakwater the light turned and turned, and the stag went on looking out to sea as though it had only ever been waiting to be carried somewhere it could see the weather coming.