Painted flash design of a stag filled with orange roses and green leaves, with bare branching antlers, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral stag silhouette design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A stag is shown in profile, its body filled with a pattern of orange roses, green leaves, small red berries and buds. The antlers are bare, branching twigs tipped with small buds, drawn in brown and gold tones. The soft painted linework sits on a plain white background with the figure centred and fully visible.

Botanical Stag Deer Antler Rose Leaves Berry Floral Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling since Tuesday, and by the third night Mrs Tallow's ledger has run out of guests who can pay. You sit by the kitchen range with a cup of mulled cider gone cold, watching the window where the lane should be. She says the stag has come down from the high wood again, which means the thaw is close, or the wolves are.

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You take the lantern out because Ada, the stable girl, swears she heard hooves at the back gate. The yard lies silent under a skin of white. The animal stands by the water trough, enormous and patient, its antlers bare and black against the sky, but the twigs at their tips are swollen with green buds, as if spring had been folded up inside them and forgotten. Across its flanks run roses, rust-orange and open, climbing over holly leaves, and a few red berries catch the lantern light like sparks.

It does not run. It lowers its head and breathes out a cloud that smells of crushed leaves and wet earth, a smell with no business in a frozen yard. You set down the lantern and hold out the heel of bread from your coat pocket. The stag takes it gently, and a single bud drops from the nearest antler into the snow, where a green shoot pushes up through the white.

By morning the gate stands open, the trough is clear, and the lane has become a river of slush. Mrs Tallow counts the bread and says nothing. Ada finds a rose petal on the step, still warm, and you pretend not to notice how your fingers keep smelling of the wood.