Neo-traditional style flash drawing of a deer head with antlers, leaves and two red arrows piercing the neck, on a splattered parchment background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer head with arrows and antlers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised deer head faces forward with large antlers, dark eyes and a black nose with a small bloody mark. Two red and cream arrows pierce the neck on the right, with a dark drip below them, and green leaves and twigs frame the head. The soft, painterly shading and watercolour splatter background sit behind the design, with dark hearts in the lower corners.

Neo-trad Deer Antler Arrow Leaves Blood Heart Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the flour on that stool, and sit where the warmth comes up through the boards. The ovens were lit before the owls had finished their business, and the dough was already sighing in its trays when the back door began to knock. Not a knock, really. More the sound a hoof makes when it has forgotten how to be polite.

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Ruth Varley had been kneading since three, and she thought it was the wind. It was a stag, standing on her step with leaves tangled through his antlers as if someone had hung a wreath on him for a wedding nobody had invited him to. Two arrows stood out of his neck, red and cream, their feathers still trembling, and a dark thread of blood ran down his throat and dripped onto the stone.

She did not scream. Bakers learn to keep their hands steady around hot things. She wiped her palms on her apron, stepped out into the cold, and drew the shafts free one at a time, slow as lifting a tray from the oven. The stag leaned his heavy head against her shoulder and breathed out warm as a fresh loaf, and for a while neither of them said a word.

When the first grey light came over the chimneys, he turned and walked back up the lane towards the wood, and the arrows stayed behind on her counter. The hunter came by at noon, asking after a stag he had lost, and Ruth sold him a cob loaf with a cross scored in the top and said she had seen nothing but flour all morning. The next dawn, and every dawn after, a heart-shaped loaf sat on her back step, still warm, and nobody in the village ever asked who was baking it.