Black ink drawing of a deer skull with antlers entwined with flowers and leaves, pinned to a line on a paper sheet against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull with flowers ink drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen or ink drawing of a deer skull with antlers, with blossoms, leaves and sprigs growing through the antlers and around the skull. The fine linework uses dense hatching and stippling for shading on the bone and petals, and the drawing is done entirely in black on a pale paper sheet. The sheet is hung from a line with wooden clothes pegs against a dark backdrop.

Botanical Antler Flower Leaves Skull Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the puddle by the fish stall, it's deeper than it looks, and the gutter's full of cabbage leaves again. Right, sit close. The rain won't stop before dusk, so we may as well have a story out of it. Old Tobias Penhale kept a stall at Thornbury market selling pegs, string and mended umbrellas, and one wet March he came down off the moor carrying a deer skull under his arm. Bleached white, the antlers still branched like a winter oak. He hung it from the awning rail, and nobody could persuade him to take it down.

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Nell Ashby sold sweet peas and foxgloves from the stall opposite, and she said the skull looked lonely up there among the umbrellas. So each morning she came over with a bucket of stems and wove them through the antlers, a sprig of fern here, a bell of foxglove there. By May the bones had blossoms growing out of them, and people stopped in the rain to look, paying for their string in buttons and bread and the odd sixpence. Tobias was pleased with the trade, though he never said so.

Then the council man came with his clipboard and said the awning was cluttered and the skull was a hazard in high wind. Nell told him the flowers would go over by August. Tobias told him the skull knew its own weather. They argued until the rain came harder and the clipboard went soft in his hands, and in the end he walked off with nothing settled.

When the blooms browned that summer, Tobias took a sheet of paper and drew the whole thing in ink, every antler point, every stippled petal, so the flowers would not be lost. He pegged the drawing to a line between the stalls, and it is still there in the wet, if you know where to look. Now, who wants a penny of string?