Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a fawn head with thistle flowers on the forearm, shaded with dotwork stippling.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fawn and thistle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fawn's head in profile sits above a cluster of thistle flowers and spiky leaves, all drawn with loose, overlapping linework. Stippled dotwork shading gives the animal's face and the flower heads their soft tone, while faint circular lines sit behind the design. The piece is entirely black and grey and fills the length of the forearm, with a blurred indoor background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Fawn Deer Thistle Flower Leaves Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tess,

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I nearly didn't go on Saturday, and then I found myself standing in the car park of the old grammar school with the engine ticking behind me, already halfway across the tarmac. The hall still smells of floor polish and wet coats. Mr Pryce still sings the register as though it's 1987. Nobody knew me until I said the word thistle, and then Dennis Ackroyd went red and started talking about the railway cutting as if we'd been there last week.

You'll remember the fawn that came up the embankment that August, the one we called Biscuit because you'd had a packet in your satchel and kept offering it to her. She'd stand on the far side of the wire with her ears turned right round, listening to the trains, and we'd sit in the thistles pretending not to be watching her. Dennis says the council ploughed the whole cutting in the spring. He says there's nothing left but gravel and a bus shelter.

I walked out after the speeches anyway, down past the bike sheds to where the fence used to have a gap. The thistles had come back, taller than my head, their heads gone silver and split open as if they'd been waiting for someone to come back and count them. I stood there a long time. Nothing came out of the trees except a crisp packet and a man with a spaniel.

I've tucked one of the seed heads into this envelope. It was in my coat pocket for three days before I knew what it was. Come up in the spring and we'll go and look together. Bring the biscuits.

Love, Margaret