Black ink line drawing of a pine tree, a deer and hatched hillside with a banner reading Prone to Wander, on aged paper.

Prone to Wander pine and deer design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows a tall pine tree rising above a banner that reads PRONE TO WANDER, with a small deer on a hatched hillside. The linework is fine and black, built from short hatching strokes on the hill and ferns, with no shading. The design is drawn in black ink on a cream, aged paper background, centred in the frame.

Botanical Lettering Pine tree Banner Deer Fern Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the fire wants feeding before I start, and Mairi, stop picking at that scab on your knee. It's a long night and the wind's on the thatch, so you'll have to listen hard.

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The pine stood alone on the ridge above Glenderry, taller than any church steeple, with ferns folding down the slope beneath it like the pages of a book nobody had read. A surveyor came up the track one May, Duncan Ross, with his brass chain and a tin of black ink, sent by the laird to draw the hill so the boundaries could be settled. He pegged out his lines and sketched every frond he could find, and every morning the deer that grazed the slope had shifted, so his lines were never quite where he'd left them.

He tied a grey linen ribbon to the lowest bough of that pine and wrote on it, in letters his mother could have read from the glen, PRONE TO WANDER. The laird's clerk thought it a joke at his expense. Duncan only laughed and said the hill had a habit of leading a man astray, and he meant to follow it until the map was true. Forty days he walked it. Each evening a stag stood on the hatched slope below the pine, watching him, not the least bit afraid.

On the forty-first morning the map was finished and the cart was waiting at the bottom of the track. Duncan climbed up one last time and found a second strip of linen knotted beside his own, and the stag gone. When the clerk unrolled the drawing in Edinburgh, he found a faint path inked across it that led nowhere but to the foot of that tree. So if you ever go wandering, lads, tie your ribbon where you'll find it again, and mind you don't let the deer lead you off without a name.