Black and grey shaded tattoo of a deer's head with large antlers on the outer thigh, in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer head with antlers on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing deer head with a broad set of antlers is tattooed on the outer thigh, with the ears spread to either side. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and detailed, giving the fur, eyes and muzzle a realistic, three-dimensional look. The design is entirely black and grey and sits centred on the frame against plain skin, with a dark garment edge at the top right.

Realism Thigh Deer Antler Stag Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came up the shaft on the morning after the roof fell at Hollin Pit, and nobody saw it come. The banksman found it standing on the landing with the cage gate open behind it, dust settling on its ears, its antlers spread wider than the doorframe. He said it looked at him the way his mother used to, as if it had already decided what he would do next.

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Nobody in Hollin Bottom had a word for an animal that walked out of the ground. The old women said it was the hill's own beast, come to count the men. Tom Ackroyd, who had lost two brothers to the seam, said it was only a deer that had strayed into the workings and that they should open the gate and let it go. They did. The stag walked out past the winding house and into the frost, and it did not look back, though the men said its eyes stayed on the pit the whole way up the valley.

The next week the rescue party went down the east drift on a rumour of air, and they found eleven men alive in a pocket of old roadway, sitting in the dark with their lamps out to save the oil. One of them swore that a warm breath had come along the tunnel, and a wet nose had pressed against his palm, and he had followed it until the air grew sweet.

Ackroyd never went below again. He kept a stag's head carved over his door, and when his grandson asked why the animal faced the street instead of the hill, he said the beast had never been guarding the village from the mine. It only wanted to be sure the men were coming up behind it.