Blue pen drawing of a tattoo design showing a stag with blossoming branches for antlers above a woman's face framed in a circle, in a neo-trad style.

Stag and woman in a circle with blossom branches

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A blue ink drawing on white paper of a stag's head with ornate antlers that grow into branches covered in blossom. Below the stag, a woman's face with long flowing hair sits inside a circular frame, with a fine line and shaded finish. The drawing is shown on paper with several pens around the edges, with no body part visible.

Neo-trad Botanical Stag Antler Blossom Branches Woman Face Hair Circle Deer

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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

The stag came down the lane on the third morning of the blossom, its antlers already flowering, and you were the only one on the Dunmere fair awake to see it. The showmen were still asleep in their vardos, the big wheel a black lattice against a sky the colour of skimmed milk. You had been sent to check the generator and nothing more, but the animal stopped at the wagon tongue and looked at you with the patience of something that had walked a long way to be looked at.

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Its antlers branched like old apple trees, and petals dropped from them onto the wet cobbles of the green. Mrs Okonedo, who ran the coconut shy and had lived on the road longer than the tarmac, had once told you that stags were messengers for people who had forgotten how to listen. You had laughed at her. Now you held out the flask of tea you were carrying, and the stag bent its great head and breathed warm across your knuckles. When you looked up, a woman was standing in the gap between the caravans, hair full of petals, face pale as paper.

She didn't speak. She turned and walked toward the tents, and the stag followed her, and the fair woke around you to the sound of kettles and a dog barking. Nobody else had seen anything. By noon the deer was gone, the blossom had blown into the drains, and the fortune teller swore on her mother's grave that there had never been a deer at all.

That evening you found a petal pressed inside your ticket book, its edges faintly blue as if dipped in ink. You still check the generator every morning and still leave the flask out on the step. Some mornings the lane is empty. Some mornings the branches are back, and you think that one day the woman will be waiting there to tell you what the stag wanted.