Black and white photo of a woman's upper back with her hair in a bun, showing a small fine line stag head tattoo at the base of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small stag head tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a woman with her hair in a loose bun, her shoulders and upper back bare apart from a dark off-shoulder top. A small stag head with antlers sits at the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The thin, clean linework is in black ink against pale skin, and the plain light background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Antler Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag stood on the towpath at Hollin Lock the week the ice went out, its head high and its antlers thin as frost against the willows. Old Tobias Wren said a stag that close to the houses meant the river was owed something. He had said the same of his brother, who had shot one above the weir in a hard winter and was taken by the current before the spring floods were done.

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Nobody on the Marigold argued with him. They had lost the brass bell from the bow in the flood, and it had never turned up in the reeds or the silt, so Ada Wren went down the bank that evening with a loaf and a length of rope. She did not look straight at the stag. Old people said you should never look straight at what has come to collect.

The stag let her come near. Its breath smoked in the cold, and it lowered its head as though it wanted her to see the grey of its muzzle. Ada tied the bell to the lowest branch of the willow, where the water could hear it, and stepped back onto the path. When she turned round the stag was already walking into the trees, unhurried, and the rope had been drawn off the branch as neatly as a stitch.

In the morning the bell hung from the bow of the Marigold, polished and cold, with a single white antler tine lying in the coil of rope beside it. Tobias picked the tine up, turned it over twice, and set it on the shelf above the stove without a word about rivers.