Two matching black and grey fine line tattoos on a pair of forearms, one showing a stag head and one a deer skull, both inside thin geometric circles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching stag and skull tattoos on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two mirrored tattoos sit side by side on a pair of arms. The left shows a living stag's head with curved antlers, and the right shows a deer skull with the same antler shape, both drawn in fine lines with stippled shading. Thin circles, straight guide lines and small dots surround each motif, and the black and grey ink is set against pale skin on a dark background.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Forearm Stag Deer Antler Skull Circle Geometric line Dot Matching pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabry Coyle had carried the box from the coach station in Carlisle, and by the time the hall lights dimmed for the speeches he had decided to give it to Tom before anyone else noticed it was there. Tom was at the far table with a paper cup of wine going warm in his hand, laughing at something a woman in a green coat had said about the chemistry lab.

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Inside the box were two drawings on tracing paper, each one a stag inside a ring of fine lines. They had made them the summer they were fourteen, when they had decided the old bell tower was a sundial and that the reservoir behind the cricket field was the only honest mirror in the parish. The first drawing was the stag as it came down to the water every October, with its head raised and its antlers curled like a pair of hands. Their gran had told them that a stag would let you see it once and never twice, and that the trick was to keep your eyes on the ridge and not the beast.

The second drawing was the same stag with the flesh taken off. Mabry had made it the winter the animal was found in the frost by the sluice gate, and he had never shown it to anyone. Tom unfolded it slowly under the table lamp and turned it to the light. He said the stag had never died, only gone over the ridge where nobody could follow. Mabry said the rings were the ridge. They argued about it for a while, the way they had argued at fourteen, until the woman in the green coat came over to ask what they were looking at.

Tom took a biro from his jacket and put a small dot at the centre of each circle, where the guide lines crossed. "So they know where to stand," he said, and folded both pages back into the box. Each October after that, one of them walked to the reservoir and waited at the edge of the water, watching the living stag, while the other stood a little further back and watched the bone.