Two matching deer silhouette tattoos side by side on forearms, the right one with the word love in script beneath, shaded in blue and pink.

Matching deer silhouettes on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side tattoos show stylised buck silhouettes with antlers, outlined in dark ink. The deer are shaded with blue-purple tones on the left and pink-red tones on the right, and the right tattoo has the word love in cursive script below it. The composition is a close crop of two arms with the tattoos mirrored across the frame.

Forearm Deer Antler Silhouette Love Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell split the ash log down its spine the week the river flooded the lower lane, because her brothers had quarrelled over which of them would get the barn and neither would give way. She took the two halves to the bench and carved a buck into each, both leaping left, then turned one over so the pair faced each other with their antlers spread like open hands. Her brothers watched from the gate and said nothing, which was how they said most things.

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The left buck she sank in a bucket of river water where the woad grew thick, and it came out the colour of a bruise going down. The right she rubbed with crushed cherry bark and the ash of a fire that had burned all night, and it came out red at the edges, like a hand after frost. She cut the word love into the lintel above the door, deep enough that rain would not wear it smooth, and she did not say who it was for.

When the brothers finally sat down at the same table, they found the two bucks hung on either side of the door, facing inward. Ada had fixed them so that closing the door brought the antlers together, and the first time it swung shut in the wind, the sound was small and clean, like two cups set down on the same wood.