Black and grey dotwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a skeletal deer, a crescent moon, a dahlia at the shoulder and fine geometric lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal deer and dahlia on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stippled black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder. A skeletal deer with a ribcage and fur shading sits at the centre, with a dahlia-style flower above it and a crescent moon, stars and diamond-shaped lines in the background. The shading is built from dense dots and fine linework, and the design wraps around the arm.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Deer Skeleton Dahlia Flower Crescent moon Moon Star Arrow Geometric line Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the deer on the eleventh-floor landing the morning after the lads from Kestrel House swore a stag had gone over the car park at midnight. It is not a stag. It is a doe, or what the foxes left of one, and she stands between the bin chute and the fire door with her ribs showing through the grey fur like the slats of a broken chair. Nobody has touched her. Mrs Okafor from flat 14 has set a dahlia in a jam jar beside one hoof, which is the sort of thing that happens on this estate and never gets mentioned in the residents' newsletter.

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Dennis from the council says she'll go to the tip with the fly-tipping. You say nothing, because you have a rule about bones. So at four, when the lifts are dead and the block is only the hum of strip lights and somebody's telly through a wall, you carry her up the stairwell in a bedsheet, one flight at a time. The lift smells of vinegar and you are not going to ask it for favours.

On the roof the wind takes the sheet and nearly takes you with it. You lay her on the gravel under a thin paring of moon that hangs over the Co-op sign, and you find the stars the way your nan taught you, by counting the ones that don't blink. Below, the car park lights go out one by one, as if someone is working down a list. You fold the sheet into a square and leave it under her head.

When you come back down your hands are empty and smell of cold iron. The jam jar is still on the landing, and the dahlia has begun to drop its petals one at a time onto the lino, which is more ceremony than most of us get on the way out.