Watercolour-style tattoo of a deer skull with antlers and red poppies on the outer thigh.

Deer skull and poppies on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A deer skull with branching antlers is the central subject, with two large red poppies with orange and yellow shading overlapping its lower right side. Loose watercolour-style splashes in red, teal, orange and green surround the skull, with black drips and dots scattered across the design. The image is a close crop of a thigh, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Antler Poppy Flower Watercolour splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had hung on the back wall of the Hart and Hounds since before anyone in Hollin Marsh could remember, and every June poppies came up through the cellar flags as if someone had sent for them. Mabel Cutter had inherited the pub, the skull and a tin of her father's sign-painting colours, and for years she dusted the bone and said nothing about it.

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The winter the roof leaked over the bar, the antlers began to split and the grey of the bone went the colour of old string. Mabel took the tin down. She mixed a red from crushed petals, a teal from the pond where the stag had drunk, and an orange from the marigold hedge by the lych gate. She worked on the wall by lamplight while the regulars grumbled about the smell of linseed and bought their drinks anyway.

In February Hal Dressler came in, the man who had raised the rifle on the far side of Blackwood forty years before. He sat under the skull with his cap in his hands and said the stag had walked into the beaters' line with its head up, as if it knew the way out and had decided not to take it. Mabel poured him a half he didn't touch. "Then let it keep its colours," she said, and he nodded as though she had settled something for both of them.

By Michaelmas the stag wore red and teal splashed over its skull like weather, and black drips ran down the plaster where the poppies had been pressed into the cellar floor. Hal came in every Thursday now and bought one pint, and when the door opened on a gust, the petals on the bar lifted and settled again, as if the room were breathing out.