Small black fine line tattoo of a curved antler arc on the inner forearm, shown in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small antler arc on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black tattoo of a curved pair of antlers, forming an open arc, sits on the inner forearm of a bare arm. The lines are bold, smooth and filled in, with tapering tines along the top and sides. The image is black and white, with a dark sleeve or jacket edge on the left and a plain light wall behind the arm.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Antler Arc Wildlife

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I found the second antler under the portcullis chain the morning the wind took the last of the chapel roof. The first lay in the nettles by the postern, pale as a bleached rib, its tines worn smooth by a winter of rain. Together they made a shape I could hold in both hands like a broken horseshoe, and I stood in the gatehouse working out whether they had ever belonged to the same beast.

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The ledger in the steward's room, where the damp comes through the plaster in brown tongues, says the last family left in 1794 and took the deer park with them. Nobody wrote down the stag. Nobody needed to. It came back each autumn to the hollow under the south wall, lifted its head at the dogs, and dropped its crown wherever it pleased, the way a man might drop a glove.

I carried the antlers up to the cottage and laid them on the table beside the kettle. My grandson Tomas, who is nine and afraid of nothing except the dark, asked whether it hurt the deer to lose them. I told him no, that the body simply stops needing what it had, and that the new ones grow up under the old in a soft velvet that itches. He thought about that for a long time, then asked if I could grow a new thumb the same way. I said I would have to ask the stag.

Before he went home I bent the two pieces until their points almost met and bound them with garden wire. Then I hung the arc on the iron nail above the gatehouse door, where the stone still keeps off the weather. In April a blackbird went in and out of the gap all day, building in the open curve, and I left it be.