Black ink drawing of a stag head with antlers, filled with floral, zigzag and diamond patterns on an aged paper background.

Ornamental stag head design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A stag head in profile is drawn as a bold black silhouette, with the antlers, face and neck each filled with decorative patterns. The upper antlers and neck are filled with triangles, dots and fine hatching, while the middle of the head holds rows of flowers and scrolling foliage. The lower neck section uses diamonds, zigzags and bands of dots, set against a warm beige background.

Geometric Botanical Stag Deer Antler Flower Diamond Zigzag Triangle Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woodcutter's daughter had promised the stag nothing, but the stag came down to the wedding anyway, stepping out of the birch wood at the hour when the bread was being broken. Her mother saw him first and dropped the knife. He had a crown of branches so thick with carved leaves and little flowers that the lamplight could not get through them, and under the crown his face was patterned like a good quilt, diamonds down the neck and a band of dots round the throat.

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Nobody in the village had ever seen a stag wear a wedding cloth, but this one had been woven in the same blue and cream as the bride's, and he bowed to the groom with the courtesy of a man who knows the price of a bridegroom's word. The groom, whose name was Tomas and who had sold his father's mill for the feast, went white and asked what the stag wanted. The stag said nothing. He only turned his head so the zigzags on his neck caught the fire, and Tomas understood that the wood had sent a guest and that the guest had come to be fed.

So they fed him. They set out the honey cakes and the good salt, and the stag ate from the bride's own bowl, slowly, as if counting. When the fiddler began, the stag walked to the middle of the floor and stood there until the dancers made a ring around him. Then he lowered his antlers, one at a time, and the whole room could hear the small sound of leaves scraping on the boards.

The bride laughed for the first time all day and went to him. In the morning the feast was cold, the bowl was empty, and the groom found a single flower pressed into the flour sack, pale as bone. He kept it. He never learned whether the stag had come to bless the marriage or to remind the village what it owed the forest, and he decided that a man who asks such questions on his wedding morning will not be given answers.