Black linework drawing of an ornate stag head with antlers, beads and dotwork patterns on cream paper, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental stag head design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag or deer head in profile, with antlers that extend beyond the top of the sheet and a string of beads draped across them. The outlines are bold and the interior is filled with fine hatching, dotwork and decorative scroll and leaf shapes, with a few faint pencil guide lines still visible. The drawing is in black ink and grey with no colour, and it sits centred on a cream sheet of paper.

Dotwork Neo-trad Stag Deer Antler Bead Leaves Ornament Mandala

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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

Dear Tomas, the pass was closed again when I reached the hut, so I've sat by the stove with your old tin of pencils and a sheet of the good cream paper you left me, and I am drawing the stag that has been standing at the tree line every evening since Tuesday. He does not run when I open the door. He turns his head slowly, the way a man turns to read a clock, and the light goes through his antlers like a comb through wet hair.

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You always said I could not draw an animal without making it look like it was about to be sold. So I have tried to do it the other way. I have given him the beads your mother strung for the Sunday market, the ones that went missing in March, which I found this morning caught in the lining of my coat. I have put them looped along his antlers in a loose necklace, and a few of them have slid down onto his brow where a stag would not normally wear anything. I have filled the cheek with little scrolls and leaves, the same ones you used to scratch into the bread crust before it went in the oven, because I could not remember how a deer's ear was supposed to sit and the leaves seemed to know.

The mist is down now and I cannot see the pass. I will post this with the first cart if the road opens. If you come up in the morning, bring the bread, and do not bring the dog. The stag will decide whether he wants company, and I think he is still deciding about me.

Yours in ink and in weather, Ilse