Black and grey dotwork and blackwork tattoo on a forearm, showing a stag silhouette against a moon, flying birds, pine trees and a deer, framed by solid black bands.

Stag and forest band on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid band wraps the forearm, with a stag silhouette in the centre beneath a pale moon and birds in flight above. Pine trees and a second deer stand on the right, with the background built up from fine stippled dots. Solid black lines below the scene add a second and third band, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Stag Deer Moon Bird Pine tree Forest Silhouette Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lower road by Tuesday, and Ailsa Dunne had stopped counting the travellers who turned up at the Hart and Hind expecting a bed and found a fire instead. Upstairs the pipes knocked all night. Her father's ledger lay open on the bar where he had left it, the pencilled columns going soft at the edges from spilt tea.

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On the third night a man came in off the forest track without a coat, his hands raw, saying he had seen a stag standing in the middle of the frozen river, its antlers lit by a moon so white it hurt to look at. Nobody believed him. Ailsa poured him a measure of something brown and watched the window, where a line of crows lifted off the pines all at once, like a sentence being struck through.

Her father had told her a story about that stag. Every hard winter one came down from the high wood to see who was still left in the valley, and whoever it looked at would be let through the snow. He had said it the way he said most things, half a joke and half a warning. She had never believed a word, which was why she took the lantern out when the stranger, sensible now, asked to be shown the way to the road.

The snow had stopped. Under the moon the forest stood grey with frost, and out on the river the stag turned its head towards the inn, slow and unbothered, as if it had been waiting for someone to bring a light. Ailsa lifted her lantern. The stranger walked on without looking back, and the prints he left in the snow ran straight to the door of the inn, where her father's boots had been standing all winter.