Black ink line drawing of a deer's head with antlers formed from branches bearing peony and magnolia blooms, suitable as a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer with floral antlers line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing deer head with its eyes and nose drawn in fine pen linework and light hatching on the face and ears. Its antlers are replaced by branches carrying open peony and magnolia flowers, along with buds and small blossoms. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background, with the flowers and branches centred above the head.

Botanical Fine line Deer Stag Antler Flower Peony Magnolia Branches Blossom Bud

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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 stag came down to Hollin Lock the morning after the flood, when the towpath was still a brown river and the magnolia on the keeper's cottage had dropped its petals overnight. You were on the back deck of the Wren with a mug going cold between your hands, and you watched him pick along the coping stones as though the water had asked him politely to stay out of it. His antlers were not antlers. They were branches, grey-barked and forked, and from every fork hung a peony the colour of a healing bruise, or an open magnolia cupped like a hand, or a bud still shut tight as a fist.

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"Don't stare at him," said Ada Thwaite from the lock beam, where she was hauling a sodden sack of coal tar off the gate. "My nan kept a tally. Every April a stag comes through Hollin, and whoever he looks at has to pay the toll." You laughed, because you had paid enough tolls this year already: to the marina at Oxford, to the bank in Reading, to the sister who still would not say your name on the phone. The stag turned his long face towards you anyway. His eyes were dark and patient and not in the least interested in your bank statements.

You set down the mug. You did not know what the toll was meant to be, so you did what the boat had taught you to do with anything that wanted passage. You untied the bow line from its ring, walked it forward, and let the Wren drift an inch off the bank so the stag could cross the footbridge without wetting his feet. He lowered his head to the water and drank, and a single magnolia petal came loose from his branches and went spinning slowly down the lock to the gates, where it stopped, caught, and waited for them to open.