Two black and grey dotwork tattoos of a doe and a stag head with antlers, placed on the inner forearms of two people.

Matching doe and stag heads on two forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show a doe's head on the left and a stag's head with branching antlers on the right, both facing the same direction. The animals are outlined in bold black lines, with the necks and faces filled in using dense stippled dots that create soft shading. The tattoos are in black and grey only, and the two designs are placed side by side with the arms touching.

Dotwork Forearm Deer Stag Antler

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The autumn the lime kilns cooled at Scarth Gill, the stag came down off the top road with his antlers still in velvet, and Mother Brannock said he would be trouble. She was right about that and wrong about the rest. He stood at the edge of the bean field every dusk, close enough that the dogs could smell him and far enough that nobody could throw a stone, and he waited for the doe who came out of the alder wood to feed on the wet ground.

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Her name was Ruth, though the men at the mill called her Bramble because she had torn her ear on the wire fence and it healed in a point. She had never grown a crown and never would. Folk said that was a bad sign in a beast, and the stag said nothing of the kind. He lowered his head to her in the dew, and each spring when the bone dropped away he left the old antlers in the bracken for her to find. She carried them home one at a time until the porch was full of them and the cat slept among the tines.

The winter the river froze to the stones, Tomas Vell came up the lane with a sack and a lantern, paid by the gentry at Hollin House to bring back a stag's head for the hall. He found the bean field empty. He found Ruth instead, standing on the ice with her ears flat and her breath going up white. She did not move aside. Tomas was a sensible man. He set the sack down on the wall, walked home with the lantern guttering, and told the gentry the stag had gone over the fell.

When the velvet came back on the stag's brow in April, he walked the whole way down from the top road in the dark to the edge of the alders. Ruth met him there. She had kept his last crown in the cottage all winter, and she laid it on the stone wall where the morning light would reach it first. He lowered his head to the bracken, and the two of them stood together until the sun came over the fell, neither asking the other to go anywhere.