Colour tattoo of a stag with large antlers, a bird and a red rose on a lower leg, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag and rose on a lower leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers sits above a large red rose on the front of a lower leg, with a small blue and green bird perched near the top and green foliage around the stag. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with strong reds, greens and blues. The photo is taken from a standing angle against a dark tiled floor, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag was standing in the bracken above Hollin Pit when you came up the bank with your brother's bait tin, its antlers branching out like the bare elms along the beck, a jay-blue bird perched on the highest tine as if someone had placed it there. You stopped. Nobody else was up yet. The cage had stuck at half six, and the foreman had sent the lamp boys home with orders to say nothing at the gate, so the whole village lay behind its curtains pretending to sleep.

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The stag turned its head and walked, not fast, along the old tramway towards the headframe. Every few yards it stopped and looked back at you, and each time you stopped too, the bird lifted off and settled again further on. Beside the slag heap a rose had pushed up through the cinders, red as a lamp glass, and the stag's hooves stepped round it without bruising a petal. You had never seen anything grow on spoil. Your mother said nothing grew there at all.

At the winding house the stag waited beneath the wheel. You knew the bell code because you had heard your father tap it through the wall a thousand nights: two short, one long. Your hand found the iron before you had decided anything. Far below, the rope began to sing, and the bird on the antlers threw back its head and called as if something down there had answered.

When the cage rose out of the dark, grey with dust and empty, you thought you had failed. Then the gate clanged and your father stepped out, coughing, his lamp still lit. Behind him the stag had gone, but the rose was open on the heap, and the frost on its leaves was already melting.

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