Black ink drawing of a geometric stag head with antlers, shaded with dotwork and facets, on white paper beside a black pen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric stag head design in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag head in profile is drawn in black ink on white paper, with antlers that sweep up and out of the frame. The head is built from angular, faceted triangles, and each facet is filled with stippled dots that grow denser toward the shadowed side. The image is shot from above on a cream textured surface, with a black pen lying diagonally across the lower left.

Dotwork Geometric Stag Deer Antler Geometric Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite had been dropped on the north face of Carrick Fell and the brass legs were bent, so Ada Vane sighted the bearings by eye and wrote them into the field book with a pencil she kept sharpening with her teeth. The pass ran between two shoulders of grey rock, and every evening the wind came through it in a single flat sheet that rattled the tin cups on the packhorse saddles. Three hundred yards below the col, a stag stood on a ledge of scree and did not move when the men walked past him. Her assistant, Tobias Crewe, wanted to shoot it for the larder. Ada said no, because a beast that stood still that long in a cold wind was either sick or was watching them, and she had no time for either.

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She measured the slope in triangles that week, dividing each sheet of the valley into facets the size of a man's palm, then stippling the shadow of each one with the nib until the paper went dark at the edges. Crewe thought it was a waste of ink. The stag came back every morning at the same hour, its antlers branching against the sky like the surveyor's own lines, and she began to draw it in the margins of the book, always in profile, always facing the way the wind came from.

On the last day the mist lifted early and the whole pass lay open below them, every ridge fixed on the page in its correct place. Crewe folded the map and found the stag's head drawn on the back of it, its dark side filled with dots so dense they had nearly worn through the paper. He asked her why she had not drawn the rest of the animal. Ada capped the pen and said that the head was the only part of it she had ever been sure of.