Black ink stag head with antlers above interlocking geometric triangles on the back of a hand, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag and geometric triangles on the hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is tattooed in solid black ink on the back of a hand, with the neck tapering into a dark, filled shape. Below it, a fine-lined geometric figure of interlocking triangles, drawn with thin and dotted lines, sits on the hand. The image is in black and grey against a textured grey background, with the hand and dark nail polish the only other subjects.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Stag Antler Deer Triangle Geometric Hand

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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

Dear Hollis, the chain is in the wagon where you left it, and the third station is not where the old charts say. I have walked the ridge of Vennmark four mornings running, and each time the same stag stands at the edge of the larch wood, watching me set up the theodolite as though it had come to inspect my work. Its antlers branch like a dead tree in frost. I have counted the points more often than is sensible.

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Yesterday I stopped taking readings and followed it instead. It walked the crown of the hill without once looking back, and wherever it paused I drove a peg. Three pegs made a triangle, which was wrong, so I drove a fourth, and the four drew two triangles locked tip to tip, a star no royal cartographer has ever put on a sheet. I have chalked the pegs on the flagstones of the mapping hall in Ostrel so you can see before you judge me.

The chamberlain came down this morning in his good boots and asked whether the Crown had commissioned a hunt. I said it had commissioned a survey, and the survey had acquired a stag. He did not laugh. He said the stag was the old kingdom's sigil and that whoever drew it into a royal map had better have a reason. I have none I would put in writing, so I have put in the pegs instead.

Come up once the frost is off the larches. Bring the fine pen for dotted lines. I want the stag drawn in the corner of the sheet, its neck run down into a solid dark shape the way the hill runs down to the mere, and the star left blank in the middle. I have stared at it so long I no longer know whether I am measuring the hill or it is measuring me. Your friend, Aurel.