Dotwork and geometric flash design of a deer with branching antlers linked by constellation dots, drawn in fine brown ink on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer with constellation antlers design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stippled deer stands in profile, its antlers drawn as branching lines joined by small dots like a star map. Thin lines and dotted circles frame the deer, with two stacked circles and trailing lines running down below its legs. The drawing is in fine brown ink on cream paper, with the shading built from dots and the composition centred on the animal.

Dotwork Geometric Deer Antler Constellation Circle Dot Branches Line Stag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Vell had gone up to the Gallow Pass for the last of the ewes when the stag stepped out of the sleet and stood on the track as if it had been waiting for him. Its antlers were a winter tree with stars caught in the forks, and he knew the old saying about such beasts: you could not take one without first being shown the road home.

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He did not raise his bow. He followed it instead, down past the cairn and the frozen tarn, through a gap in the rocks where two grey rings of stone stood one above the other like the lid and base of a jar. The stag stopped at each ring and waited, and each time the dots on its antlers flickered, as though someone were counting off the nights.

At the last ring the animal lowered its head and looked at him with a patience he found hard to bear. Tomas remembered his sister, who had walked this pass the year before and never come down, and he understood that the road home was not a road for the living. He turned his back on the stag and walked the way he had come, counting the stars on his own knuckles until the sleet thinned and the valley lights showed below.

Each winter after, he left a sack of barley at the cairn. Nothing ever came for it, but in the morning the grain was always gone, and the snow around the stones was printed with hooves that stopped at the rings and did not go on.