Neo-traditional tattoo of a deer with antlers in an ornate purple and grey oval frame, with a chickadee, oak leaves and a red gem, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer in ornate frame with chickadee

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stag or deer with large antlers is shown in profile inside an ornate oval frame with purple scrollwork and beaded edging. A chickadee perches at the lower left, and oak leaves with a red gem and dangling drops sit along the bottom of the frame. The shading is smooth and painterly, with bold colour in orange, purple, green and red set against soft grey tones.

Neo-trad Thigh Deer Antler Bird Gem Frame Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The portrait is still above the piano in the sports hall, which nobody warned you about. Someone has dusted the gilt frame but not the glass, so the stag looks out through a film of old chalk and breath. Its antlers are the same ones Mr Pardoe hauled in from a farm sale in 1987 and hung in Room Six until the caretaker called them a fire hazard.

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You find Yvonne Blackwood by the squash table, holding a paper plate of sausage rolls she is not eating. She still has the look she had at fourteen, when she bet you a packet of Wagon Wheels that you couldn't climb the oak by the bike sheds. You couldn't. You came down with a torn blazer and a bird's nest in your hair, and the chickadee that had been scolding you from the lowest branch flew off to the bins as if it had seen enough.

Yvonne says the painting was given by a parent who ran a taxidermy shop in Ludlow, and that the little bird in the corner was added afterwards by a pupil who got a detention for it. You don't correct her straight away. You simply look at the lower left of the frame, where the paint is thicker and the varnish has yellowed, and you see the faint pencil line under the gloss that you drew the week before the leavers' assembly.

Nobody saw you do it. You lift your cup of warm Prosecco towards the stag, which has spent three decades watching the hall empty and fill again, and you think about the oak, the packet of Wagon Wheels, and how Yvonne still owes you the chocolate.