Colour tattoo of a doe's head rising from pink roses and green leaves, placed on the thigh.

Doe and roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A pale doe's head with large ears and dark-shaded eyes and nose faces forward, emerging from a cluster of pink roses and green leaves. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the neck and muzzle and pink and red tones in the petals and inner ears. The composition fills the lower half of the thigh, with the roses framing the base of the doe's neck.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Deer Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Morwen had counted the roses along the byre wall three times before the frost came, and each time there were fewer. The doe had been taking the buds from the bottom row, leaving the stems stripped like broken teeth. Her father wanted it shot. She told him the wall was his, the roses were her mother's, and the doe belonged to nobody.

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At the head of the pass the mist came down by mid-afternoon, and the carriers came through with salt and wool and went on again before dark. Morwen took to sitting on the wall at dusk with a tin of bread crusts. The doe came down from the scree with its ears turned out like two open hands and stood just past the last rose, near enough to see the wet dark of its nose. It never touched the crusts. It only watched her, as though she were the odd thing on that hillside.

One night the snow started early and did not stop. Morwen found the doe pressed against the byre door, flank steaming, one ear torn at the edge. She did not fetch the rifle. She dragged the hay bale across the yard, and the doe came in on its own and folded itself down among the bundled cuttings from the wall. By morning the hay was trodden flat, the stems were bare, and a single pink petal lay on the step.

Her father asked where the roses had gone. Morwen said the frost had taken them. He looked at the wall, then at the lane where small hoofprints ran up toward the pass, and said nothing. The next spring the roses came back along the stones, thicker than before, and nobody on the farm spoke of shooting the doe again.