Black blackwork tattoo of an ornamental stag head with patterned dotwork and geometric fills, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental stag head on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag head with branching antlers is filled with dense patterns of triangles, diamonds, scrolls and dotted bands. The black linework is bold and the shading uses solid black fills and stippled dots. The design is shown in close view on a pale forearm against a white cloth.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Forearm Stag Deer Antler Mandala Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern book went over the side off Cape Horn, so I drew the stag again from memory on the back of a tide chart, working by the lamp in the bosun's locker. Mr Osgood, our purser, wanted a stag on the lid of his medicine chest, the antlers branching like a bare oak, and he wanted every inch of the body filled so the damp would have nothing to lift. I started with triangles because they hold their shape when the deck heels, then diamonds, then scrolls I copied off a Malay sailmaker's knotted sennit.

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The ink was lampblack thinned with rum and laid on with a steel nib. The dotted bands took longest. I put one dot down for every squall we sat through between the Plate and the Downs, and by the time the chest was finished I had lost count and stopped minding. The shading is solid black where the shadow falls under the jaw and stippled where the light would catch the cheek, if there had been any light down in that locker at all.

The captain asked why I had left the stag's eye plain. I told him an eye is the last thing a carver should fill, because it is the only part that has to look back at you. He laughed and said I was soft for a man who could keep weevils out of the biscuit with a pencil.

We made Liverpool on a grey Thursday. Osgood lifted the lid on the quay, and the dark lines had kept the salt out of every knot, and the stag stood up out of the wood as though it had walked the whole way home with us. The eye was still bare. I left it that way for him to finish, once he found a use for something he had not already counted.