Two black and grey dotwork tattoos of a doe and a stag with antlers, one on each forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Doe and stag tattoos on forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two deer head designs sit side by side on the skin, a doe on the left and a stag with branching antlers on the right. The animals are built up from stippled dots, giving soft shading across the necks and faces, while the antlers are drawn with solid, sharp linework. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the two limbs against a plain background.

Dotwork Forearm Deer Stag Antler

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down to the shore the winter the herring failed, and he stood at the edge of the tide with frost caught in his antlers, looking at the lamp burning in the galley of the ship that had run aground on the bar. Nobody in Skerry Holm had seen a stag so far from the hills. Old Maud Ferrier said he was waiting for someone, and she was right, though she was wrong about who.

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Her granddaughter Isbel had been sent out to the wreck for salt pork, with a lantern and a knife. The galley was low and smoky, and the ship's cook, a thin man named Aldous Pell, had gone over the side in the storm and not come back. In his place sat a doe, grey at the throat and patient, stirring a pot of barley with a wooden spoon as though she had done it all her life.

"You'll want to take the pork and go before the tide turns," the doe said. Isbel did not scream. She had been raised on the old stories, and in those a talking beast was a debt, not a wonder.

"What do you want for it?"

"Only that you tell him I've kept the fire in."

Isbel climbed back to the shingle with the pork under her shawl. The stag was waiting, breath smoking. She told him. He lowered his head, and for a moment the frost slid from his antlers like sugar from a spoon. Then he turned and walked into the sea, and the water rose over his back and did not wet him. Isbel never ate pork again, and every spring the herring came back to the bar.