Traditional style tattoo on a thigh showing a leaping deer with a human face and antlers, pierced by red-tipped arrows, above a red rose with black shaded leaves.

Deer pierced by arrows and rose on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A leaping deer with a human face and orange-brown antlers is pierced by several arrows, with small red drops marking the wounds. Below it sits a red rose with shaded black leaves, all outlined in bold black linework. The deer is softly shaded in tan and grey, and the composition is centred on the outer thigh.

Traditional Thigh Deer Antler Arrow Rose Leaves Blood drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had been playing the same slow number for the third time when Ada noticed the stag at the back door. It stood on the lino of the service corridor, antlers brushing the coats on the rail, and its face was a man's face, pale and tired, its mouth still moving on a word nobody had asked it to say. She had the mop in her hands. Nobody else had looked up.

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Her father had kept the hall for thirty years and never mentioned the arrows. They had come in through the fire door one winter, three of them, and the man who pulled them out had been Ada's grandfather, who did not talk about that either. The wounds were four small red drops along the flank, bright as the roses in the tin on the bar. She had seen the deer once before, crossing the car park at dusk, and had told herself it was the light.

"You'll have to dance with me," the stag said, very quietly, "or the ballroom won't let me out." Ada laughed, because it seemed the only sensible answer. She dried her hands on her skirt, walked to the edge of the floor, and asked the bandleader for the slow one, the one nobody requested after ten o'clock.

They danced under the glitter ball while the hooves clicked on the sprung boards and the couples kept to their own business, a tall partner in a borrowed jacket, lean as a hedge. At the final note he bent his head to her and the arrows slid free one by one, rattling on the parquet like dry sticks. By morning there was only a rose pressed flat under the fire door and a note in a careful hand: Thank you, Ada. Leave the lights on.