Small black stag head tattoo with antlers at the nape of a person's neck, shown in a black and white photograph of the back of the head and shoulders.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small stag head tattoo at the nape

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a stag's head with antlers sits at the base of the neck, centred between the shoulders. The design is a simple dark silhouette with little interior detail. The photograph is black and white, with the hair pinned up and the upper back and shoulders filling the frame.

Neck Stag Antler

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear about the stag before you see it, the way everything in Corrie Bridge arrives: over the counter of the post office, between the teapot and the tin of broken biscuits. Mrs Lennox says it has antlers like a candelabra and a white throat. Her husband says it has been shot twice and walks anyway. You say nothing, because you have already seen it, at dawn, standing at the edge of the rowan trees above the railway cutting, and it looked at you the way a magistrate looks at a man who has lied.

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You work in the mill office, typing invoices on a Remington with a sticking e. Mr Aird, the manager, wants the stag gone before the summer fair, and he has hired two men with rifles. You know the younger one, Dougie Pirie, who once bought you a lemonade and then told the whole school you had kissed him. On Saturday you climb the hill with a sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper, sit on a drystone wall, and wait.

The stag comes at four o'clock, when the light goes the colour of weak tea. It does not look at the rifles. It looks at you, then down into the glen where the railway runs under the road. You understand, slowly, that it is not coming towards anything. It is leaving the town the way a person leaves a room they have been asked to leave.

On Monday the Remington's e still sticks, and Mr Aird has a report of a stag seen on the Dornoch line, forty miles north. Dougie Pirie never mentions the hill again. You type the invoices as usual, and at the foot of each one you press a tiny pair of antlers into the margin with the tip of a pencil, which nobody in Corrie Bridge has ever thought to look for.