Four black antler designs arranged in a grid on a white background, shown as a flash sheet with no body placement.

Four antler designs on a flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four solid black antler designs, each a pair of antlers arranged symmetrically or in a mirrored pose. The linework is bold and silhouette-like, with tapering tines and no internal shading or detail. The designs are spaced in a two by two grid on a plain white background.

Antler Deer Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The saw had snagged on the third tine again, so Ada Pryce set the blade down and rubbed her wrists until the ache settled. Outside the workshop the rain came sideways off the hill, and the castle at Caerdunn stood above the valley with its roof gone and its windows full of sky. Eight pairs of antlers had to hang over the gatehouse by Michaelmas. The steward had sent a charred bracket and a drawing done on the back of a rent ledger, and nothing else.

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She worked through the nights under a paraffin lamp hung from a hook. Each pair had to mirror the other to the width of a thumbnail, the tines tapering to points a child could not snap. Her father had taught her that horn was honest only if you cut it wet and let it dry slow. So she soaked the bone in the trough and filed each tip until the grain showed like rings in old oak, black where the lamp caught it and grey where it did not.

When the steward came up on the seventh morning he walked the length of the trestles without speaking. Then he stopped. Ada had cut the antlers so their bases almost touched, the two halves leaning in as though they were about to share a secret across a table. "The old ones pointed outward," he said. "Like they were guarding something." She wiped her hands on her apron. "The old ones came down in a fire that started inside the walls. These are for the gate. They're meant to look at each other."

He paid her half in coin and half in firewood. She hung the first pair herself that afternoon, standing on a ladder with a mouthful of nails. From the valley road the antlers looked like the outline of a stag with the stag gone, only the shape left against the grey sky. A girl selling eggs stopped to count the points on the nearest pair, lost her count at eleven, and started again.