Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a spotted fawn with its head lowered, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spotted fawn on side ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small fawn with its head bowed and legs slightly splayed is tattooed on the side of the torso. The body is built from fine stippled dots and solid black outlines, with pale dotted spots along its back. The image is in black and grey, with a soft grey knit fabric and a hand with orange-brown ink at the top edge framing the tattoo.

Dotwork Ribs Deer Fawn Animal Spots

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spring the frost came late to the hill farms, Ysolde's grandmother found a fawn lying in the bracken below the sheepfold, spotted like a thrush's egg and too weak to stand. Nobody on Carrick Ness kept deer. The island had foxes and rabbits and the gulls that took the lambs when they were careless, but no stags had walked the cliff paths since the old laird's time. Still, the fawn drank warm goat's milk from a bottle with a rag teat, and by midsummer it was leaving its wet black prints across the kitchen flags.

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It grew strange. It would stand at the edge of the peat cuttings with its head bowed low, nosing at the ground as if it had dropped something there, and no amount of calling would bring it back before it was done. Ysolde's grandmother said this was how deer asked the earth for leave. She said it was the same in the old country, where the stags knelt to the wells before they drank. Her brother laughed and said she had made it up, but he still walked the long way round the bog that autumn.

The fawn left at the first hard frost, the way the tellers say they always do, though nobody saw it go. In the morning there was only a hollow in the bracken with the frost melted in its shape, and beside it a single white spot, the size of a thumbnail, pressed into the mud. Ysolde kept it in a tin with her mother's thimble. Some evenings, when the wind came off the sound, she set it on the windowsill and waited for the ground to ask her for something.