Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing a forest scene with a stag silhouette, a hunter figure and a large skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forest, stag and skull on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the forearm, with a dark forest of bare trees and a figure at upper left. A stag silhouette stands in the middle of the design, above a large animal skull with shaded bone texture and a small moon-like highlight in the eye socket. The shading is soft and smooth with strong contrast, and the design runs the length of the arm against a pale draped surface.

Realism Forearm Tree Forest Stag Deer Skull Animal skull Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came back to the Harrow wood the autumn after Tom Pell shot his brother's dog, and nobody in Caddon Mill was surprised by it. Old Mrs Sayer had said as much at the counter of the post office, fingering her change, and then she had said the thing about the moon, which everyone agreed was nonsense until the Thursday it was full.

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Tom went out with the rifle his father had carried at Dunkirk and sat in the bracken at the edge of the clearing from first light. The trees stood bare and grey, their branches combed upward like the wires of a broken fence. He saw the stag at last near noon, standing in the open with its head high, and it did not look at him. It looked at the sky, where a pale moon hung in the daylight like a coin someone had dropped and forgotten.

He lifted the barrel. The stag lowered its head and walked into the trees, and where it stepped the bracken lay flat as if something heavier had gone that way. Tom followed until the light went thin and the brass hunting horn he had bought from the Co-op lay cold against his ribs. He did not find the stag again. He found, instead, a skull under the roots of an oak, long bleached, with a hollow in one socket where the moon seemed to have settled as if it had been waiting there for him.

He carried it home in a feed sack and set it on the kitchen windowsill. Each night after that the moon rose in the socket and he could not stop looking at it. His mother told him to bury it. He said he would rather keep the thing that had let him go. In the spring the wood came up green, and the stag was never seen in Caddon Mill again.