Black and grey fine line tattoo on the back of a hand showing a deer skull with antlers and an arrow, flanked by two bird skulls within geometric circles and dotted lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull with arrow and bird skulls on the hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a deer skull with antlers and an arrow passing through the top of the skull, centred on the back of the hand. Two bird skulls sit either side, with thin circular and dotted guide lines linking the motifs. The work is rendered in fine, stippled linework and soft grey shading in black ink only, against a dark background.

Find an artist for this

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

The deer came in on Tuesday in a hessian sack, still smelling of the Ashworth woods, and Mr Pell wanted the skull cleaned by Friday for the county fair. I found the arrow lodged between the antlers, the shaft snapped clean an inch above the bone, the head still seated in the brow. Nobody had pulled it. Pell said the boy who shot it had walked off to the pub and never come back for either.

Keep reading

I drew it out on squared paper the way my father taught me, compass point on the crown, a ring for each eye socket, a ring for the spread of the antlers. Then I laid the two bird skulls either side, a jay and a little owl, and found that both sat exactly on the outer circle if you dropped a line straight down from the arrow tip. I pricked the guide lines in with a needle so the whole thing looked like a survey of something that had already happened.

Pell didn't care for geometry. He wanted the arrow out. I told him pulling it would split the brow, and that the rings would be wrong without it, so I left it in and wrote the measurements on the back of the card in pencil: forty-one millimetres, forty-one millimetres, nine degrees off true north.

The card went to the fair with the skull in its glass case. Nobody has ever asked me why the arrow is still there. I suppose they think it was always part of the animal, the way a compass needle belongs to the north.

More like this

Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm, with a wolf and a woman's face split by a geometric triangle and scattered diamond shapes.
Wolf and woman portrait on a forearm
Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bull skull with arrows and a crescent moon inside fine geometric circles, on the upper arm.
Bull skull with arrows and crescent moon
Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with a woman's figure, long hair and arm, on a limb in a close-up photograph.
Skull and woman silhouette in realism
Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with ridged, textured bone across the back of a hand, resting on a dark leather surface.
Realistic skull on the back of a hand
Black and grey dotwork stag head with antlers and a wireframe geometric shape on the inner forearm.
Stag head and geometric shape on a forearm
Black and grey tattoos of a human skull, an antelope skull, an animal skull and a bird skull, one on each finger of a clenched hand.
Animal skulls across four fingers
Black and grey stag head tattoo with long antlers across the back of a hand, with small letter tattoos on two fingers, in traditional and dotwork style.
Stag head and antlers on the back of a hand
Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bull skull with crescent moon, arrows and overlapping circles on the back of a lower leg.
Bull skull with arrows on a calf
Black and grey dotwork and fine line bull skull tattoo with crossed arrows and a crescent moon on the back of a leg, framed by thin geometric circles.
Bull skull with arrows and moon on a leg
Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a horned animal skull framed by fine geometric lines on the forearm.
Horned animal skull with geometric lines
Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tied bouquet of leaves and five-petal flowers on a forearm, shown in a sepia photograph.
Flower bouquet on a forearm
Black and grey realism tattoo of a horned animal skull with roses across the centre of a person's chest, above a black lace top.
Horned animal skull and roses on a chest

From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.