Black and white photo from behind of a small black fine line stag head tattoo at the nape of the neck, with the hair pinned up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small stag head on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's head and neck, with her hair in a loose bun and her shoulder covered by a dark top. A small black stag head with antlers sits at the centre of the nape. The linework is fine and simple, with minimal shading, and the plain light background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Neck Stag Deer Antler Animal head

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at Carrow Cottage Hospital had been told the stag would come down from the hill when the last ambulance left, and he had laughed at that, the way men laugh before they have done a February night shift. Then the last ambulance left, the car park lamps buzzed, and the beast was standing under the sodium light with its breath smoking.

Keep reading

Nobody on the ward would believe him. Sister Hale did, though. She had grown up in the glen and knew the old rule: you do not look a stag in the eye, and you do not offer it anything with salt in it. She brought out a cup of cold tea anyway, because the child in bed four had been crying since midnight, and the stag had come down for her, not for any of them.

The stag lowered its head to the cup. Its antlers were black against the sky, thin as the lines of a pen, and when it lifted its head again the crying had stopped. Sister Hale said afterwards that the animal had taken the weight of the night in its branching horns and carried it back up the hill, the way the pines shed their snow in the old story.

The porter swept the car park at dawn and found one set of hoofprints in the frost, leading to the gate and no further. He wrote nothing in the log. He only pinned a small drawing of antlers above the kettle, and whenever the ward got too loud after midnight, someone would glance up at it and lower their voice.