Black and grey flash design of a deer skull with antlers, wrapped in shaded roses and a small geometric diamond, on a textured cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull with antlers and roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A deer skull with long antlers sits at the base of the composition, with a crown of shaded roses and leaves over the brow. A small geometric diamond floats between the antlers, and ink splatters add texture around the flowers. The fine stippled linework and grey tonal shading are set against a distressed off-white background.

Botanical Realism Antler Rose Leaves Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall was a riding school before the war, and the stag's skull still hangs above the bar where Mr Pruett nailed it, its antlers wider than the doorframe. You are the one who has to stand beneath it every Saturday, keeping the band in time with a hand on the piano lid while the crowd fills the floor. Tonight Mrs Pruett has wired roses into the brow of the skull, deep red at the start of the evening and paler by ten, when the damp has got into the petals and the leaves have started to curl.

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Between the tines hangs the little glass diamond she bought at the Bristol market, the one that catches the mirror ball and throws a cold spark across the boards. Nobody has asked why it's there. You suspect it was meant to be a ring, or a promise, and she settled for something that would hang straight. At half past nine a young man from the Co-op asks you to waltz, and you say yes because the trumpet is playing the slow tune your father used to hum over the washing up, and because his hands are steady when yours are not.

You dance under the antlers with your cheek near his collar, and every turn brings the skull into view over his shoulder, its eye sockets full of shadow and flickering light. Somewhere past eleven a petal drops from the crown and lands on the floor between your shoes. Nobody sweeps it. By the last waltz there are a dozen of them, bruised and dark, scattered across the boards like the spots of ink that fell from the sign-painter's brush when he worked on the lettering outside.

When the lights come up at midnight, Mrs Pruett climbs the stepladder and lifts the glass diamond down, wrapping it in a handkerchief as though it might break. She leaves the roses where they are, and the skull keeps its crown for another week of dancing.