Black and grey dotwork design of a stag with large antlers, framed by roses and leaves, shown on a white background.

Stag and roses dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag's head and upper chest face forward, with a wide set of antlers rising above it. Roses with layered petals, buds and leaves form a wreath beneath the animal. The image is built from fine stippled dots that create shading across the antlers, fur and petals, with a plain white background and no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Stag Deer Antler Rose Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, because the wind up the Hollin Pass takes the sense out of anything said past your elbow. You want to know why Morag Dunning planted roses on the cairn at the top? Then hush, and I'll tell it the way my gran told it to me, with the rain ticking on the window to keep the count.

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Morag kept the lower sheepfold under the pass. Every October a stag came down out of the mist with antlers spread wide as a barn door, and it stood at the drystone wall and looked at her as if it were tallying her sheep. She called him the Reckoner. Her husband Tam had gone over the scree one February in a whiteout, and the snow kept him until May. She never spoke to the stag, but she left a handful of salt on the flat stone by the gate, and he always took it.

Then one autumn the Reckoner did not come. In his place, at the cairn where Tam's cart had been found, stood a single rose bush that nobody had carried up that road. Pale pink, its buds pinched tight against the cold. Morag dug it in with a borrowed spade and watered it from her own bucket every evening, and by spring it had climbed the stones and thrown its first flowers. The stag returned the next October, greyer about the muzzle, and walked the cairn twice, nosing the petals and leaving every leaf with a bite out of it.

Last winter a lad from the valley asked her why she kept the thing going. She told him the stag had never once come down without first lifting his head to look at the pass, and she had decided that was a question worth answering. So when the mist lifts and you see him standing on the wall with the roses blooming beneath his chin, you take your cap off. That is all the manners the pass asks of anyone.