Two forearms with matching black outline tattoos of a stylised deer with antlers, each with the words til my last breath in script beneath, on the inner forearm.

Matching deer outline tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a matching black tattoo of a stylised deer outline with antlers. Beneath each design is a curved line of black script reading til my last breath, partly cut off where it meets the edge of the arm. The linework is bold and solid with some soft shading, and the image is in black ink only against warm skin tones on a dark background.

Forearm Deer Antler Script Matching tattoo

Find an artist for this

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

Hetty Marsh had kept the upper woods of Carrow Fell for thirty-one winters, and she knew the stag by his crooked left tine long before she saw his face. The estate men called him Old Bracken. Every November he came down to the ash trees and rubbed his antlers against the same grey trunk until the bark shone pale as a shin bone.

Keep reading

That November he came with a doe beside him, thin and nervous, her hooves ringing on the frost. Hetty watched them from the stile for three evenings. On the fourth, a poacher's dog loosed from the lower lane drove the doe out across Cold Mere. Bracken went after her without thinking, and the ice gave under the two of them with a crack like a rifle shot.

Hetty ran down with her coil of rope and her lantern. The doe had already scrambled onto the bank. Beyond her, Bracken's head showed above the black water, his antlers hooked over a broken shelf of ice that kept folding back on him. Hetty lay flat, paid the rope out across the white, and talked to him the way she talked to ewes in lambing time. He hauled himself out at last, streaming and shaking, and stood in the reeds beside the doe. Neither of them moved away.

Next morning the frost had settled hard and the two deer were grazing under the ash. Hetty found a smear of tar on her palm from the rope and thought of the words her husband had cut above the byre door before he died. She left the gate open behind her and went home through the bracken, and she did not once that winter wonder which of them had saved the other.