Black and grey fine line tattoo of a stag's antlers on the side of a finger, in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag antlers on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black and grey tattoo of a stag's head with antlers sits on the side of a finger. The linework is fine and thin, with light shading inside the antlers and along the base. The black and white photograph is taken close up against a plain background, with the finger filling most of the frame.

Fine line Hand Stag Antler Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down through the orchard the week the frost took the medlars, and you were the only one who did not reach for the gate pole. Old Mrs Vell had kept the walled garden at Harrowby for forty years and she said the beast had a right to the windfalls. She said it with her back to you, pricking out leeks in the cold, and you took that as permission to stop being afraid of him.

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By February he was coming to the bench by the cold frames. He would stand with his head low while you cut back the rhubarb crowns, and his antlers caught the grey light like a bare hawthorn in the hedge. You learned his habits the way you learned the soil: he drank at the water butt after dark, he would not cross the gravel where the cat slept, and he never once touched the seedlings you had pressed into the trays with your thumb.

The morning Mrs Vell was carried out on a stretcher, the stag was at the gate. You watched him watch the men lift her, and when the lane was empty he turned and went back up into the trees without his usual slow look over his shoulder. That was the last time he came down.

In April you found a single antler tine in the mulch under the medlar, grey and light as a bird bone. You set it on the windowsill of the potting shed, beside her old trowel, and in the evenings you watered the beds as she had taught you, slowly, so nothing was washed away.