Solid black geometric stag head tattoo with angular antlers and a circle, on the inner forearm, in blackwork style.

Geometric stag head on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised stag head is drawn in bold, angular black linework, with branching antlers, a solid circle between them, and pointed ears. The face is built from interlocking triangular and chevron shapes, and a chevron band sits below the neck. The tattoo is solid black ink with no shading, and it fills the forearm from the wrist upwards.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Stag Deer Antler Circle Chevron Triangle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dougie Rennie drew the stag on the chart table in the last week of October, with a carpenter's pencil and the edge of a steel rule, and he never once lifted the pencil to go round a corner. Every line met the next at an angle that looked wrong until you held the paper to the lamp and saw it was the only angle the animal could have. He said the shape was in the sea already if you knew how to take a bearing off it. I thought he was drunk. He was usually drunk by six, but never before the tide turned.

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The Morven Lass was one of eleven boats working the Fladen ground that winter, and the others laughed at the drawing until the herring went deep and we were running blind through sleet. Dougie laid his pencil on the point where the two black triangles met, the place he called the throat, and told me to steer for the notch between the antlers. Nobody argued. We had nothing else to steer by.

We found the shoal at the circle, a dark dot on the paper that turned out to be a pinnacle of rock twenty fathoms under us. The nets came up so heavy the winch groaned like a cow in a bog. Dougie stood at the rail with his hands deep in his oilskin and watched the rest of the fleet burning their lamps in the wrong water.

When we came in, he took the chart from the wheelhouse, rubbed the stag out with his thumb, and drew it again on the back of the sale note. He said a skipper gets one good chart and keeps it by drawing it twice. I still have that sale note. The stag is the only thing on it that doesn't look like money.