Black and grey realism tattoo of a buck's head and antlers set among trees, sitting on the upper arm.

Realistic buck and forest on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic tattoo of a deer's head in profile, with large antlers rising behind it and a dense forest of tree trunks filling the background. The fur, eye and muzzle are shaded in fine greys with soft highlights, while the trees and antlers use heavier black to create depth. The composition fills the frame, with the deer's face at the centre and the design wrapping across the upper arm.

Realism Upper arm Deer Antler Forest Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, the bread isn't going anywhere and neither am I, though my knees would argue. You want a wedding story? I'll give you one with a deer in it, because every wedding in this valley has a deer in it somewhere, usually at the bottom of a glass.

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Fifty-odd years back, your great-grandfather Tom Garvie went up the larch wood above Glenmorrie before dawn with a rifle he had no business carrying, three days before his own wedding. He was after a buck everyone had seen and nobody had shot, a great beast with antlers as wide as a cart's yoke and one tine snapped off like a broken pencil. The mist was thick enough to cut. Tom said the trunks went up forever, grey and then black, and he couldn't tell which were trees and which were the antlers reaching out between them.

He lifted the rifle. The buck turned its head, slow as a clock hand, and looked at him across the clearing. Tom told me he could see the wet on its nose and the pale fur at its throat, and that he thought of Nan, who had made him promise to come home with his boots dry and nothing dead on his conscience. He lowered the rifle. The buck stood there another minute, then walked into the larches as if it had only come out to check the weather.

Tom never fired a shot in that wood again. He told the story at his own wedding supper, and at mine, and every time he reached the mist he'd stop and ask whoever was listening to guess which was the buck and which was the trees. Nobody ever got it right. Then he'd pour the whisky and say the deer had the better sense of the two of them.