Black and grey tattoo of a deer skull with antlers and flowering botanical stems on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull and queen anne's lace on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A deer skull with antlers sits at the base of the design, with thin botanical stems rising from it to umbel flower heads and feathery foliage. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled shading on the skull and bone, and fine dotted guide lines forming arcs and a circle behind the motif. The design is entirely black and grey and is set against bare skin with a dark wooden fence in the background.

Botanical Realism Geometric Upper arm Antler Flower Stem Foliage Dotted line Circle Arc

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Crane had kept the hart's skull on the sill of the net loft since the winter her husband went out past the breakwater and did not come back. The fishermen of Scarrow Haven said it was bad luck to bring bone into a working building, but Mabel said the antlers were the only thing on the harbour that had ever stood up straight for her, and nobody argued with a woman who had hauled her own nets for thirty years.

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That June the queen anne's lace came up through the gravel of the yard, the way it always did along the sea wall, and one stalk found the skull where she had left it on the sill. By July it had wound its stems between the tines and opened white heads like small lamps. Mabel cut none of it. The gulls stopped working the bait boxes, and the old men in the Anchor said the lace had climbed as far as the lighthouse path, a green thread pulled tight from the sea to the moor.

In September the lifeboat crew found a boy asleep in the lace at the top of the cliff, his boat gone onto the Teeth in the fog. Mabel walked up with a lantern and the skull under her arm and sat with him until the crew came with their rope. When the boy asked whose bones they were, she told him they were her husband's, and that the sea had taken the man but given back the lace. By October the flowers had gone to brown seed, but the stems still held the skull upright on the sill, and Mabel left them standing for the birds.