Two black and grey dotwork flash designs in a sketchbook: a shaded rose cluster with leaves over a cracked triangle, and a geometric deer skull with antlers, feathers and flowers.

Rose and geometric deer skull dotwork designs

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two hand-drawn tattoo designs sit on an open sketchbook page. The left design shows a large rose with dotted shading, surrounded by leaves and buds and anchored by a triangle with cracked texture. The right design shows a faceted, geometric deer skull with antlers and feathers above, framed by a black triangle and layered flower outlines, drawn in clean linework with stippled shading.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Rose Leaves Triangle Antler Feather Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down off the peat the week the ice broke up, and Mabel Quarrie, who kept the bee skeps behind the chapel, swore it had walked out of the dry ground rather than through the reeds. Nobody believed her. They didn't believe her about the roses either, the thin pink ones that had sprung along the drove wall after thirty years of nothing but nettles.

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Her grandson Tom came to fetch her for the parish meeting, where the men wanted the stag shot before it ate the tithe barn's seed. He found her on the bank with a pencil and the back of a seed catalogue, drawing the animal as a stack of flat planes, every cheek and brow cut square like a folded map. "It's got no weight to it," he said. "It's a kite." She told him a stag is only the shape the light makes when it strikes bone at the right angle.

The men argued until dusk. Mabel sat at the back and said nothing, turning the catalogue over in her lap. When they finally walked out to the drove, the stag stood among the roses with rook feathers caught in its antlers, and the whole hedge had gone quiet. Nobody lifted a gun. Tom held the lamp up and watched the animal breathe out in little clouds of frost.

Mabel went past them to the wall, where the cracked black earth lay in its triangle of dried mud, and pressed her palm flat against it. "Leave the roses," she said. "Water them." By morning the frost had melted in a neat ring around each bloom, as if someone had stippled it there in ink.