Colour tattoo of a deer skull with antlers and a green eye inside a red-outlined triangle, on a calf in a neo-traditional and realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull and eye in a triangle

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A deer skull with antlers sits at the centre of the design, with a detailed green eye inside a triangle above it. The skull is shaded in soft teal, yellow and pale tones, with fine linework on the bone edges. Red lines radiate from the triangle and sit behind the skull, and the warm skin tones frame the composition in a tall, vertical layout.

Neo-trad Realism Calf Antler Skull Eye Triangle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from the door, because the snow has buried the lane to the gateposts and nobody's leaving before Thursday. Right. You'll want to hear about the stag. Every November it came down off Harrow Fell, grey in the muzzle, antlers spread like a pair of hayforks, and it never once set a hoof on the Tallow road. Everybody knew to leave it be.

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One winter a surveyor from Carlisle came through with a brass theodolite and a notion that the stag was a boundary post standing in the wrong place. He pitched his tent in the lee of the chapel wall. By morning the tent lay flat, the tripod stood alone in the snow, and the stag was grazing on the chapel roof, which it had no business doing. Nobody saw what passed between dusk and dawn. But the surveyor came down to the bar with one eye turned the green of bottle glass, and he said it could see the lines of the land, every drain and buried stone and hedge, and that it would not let him sleep until he'd drawn them all.

He drew them. Red ink, ruled straight, fanning out from a little triangle he pinned above his bed, the way you'd pin up a map. Each night the lines grew longer, and each morning the stag stood nearer the door. When the thaw came they found him sitting under the chapel wall with his compasses in his lap and the skull beside him, picked white, its antlers still holding the snow.

So if your road seems straighter tonight than it was when you came up, don't go pulling any fence posts. That's all I've got. Pass the cider, Tom, and bank that fire.