Black ink pen drawing of a stag head with flowers, birds and a beetle within a circle of branching antlers and fine geometric lines, with no body part shown.

Stag, beetle and flowers in a geometric circle

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A stag's head sits at the base of a circular frame formed by branching antlers and fine geometric construction lines. A large beetle with spread wings sits at the centre, and small birds and open flowers surround the stag. The image is built from fine stippling and hatching in black ink on white paper, with no colour.

Botanical Geometric Stag Beetle Bird Flower Antler Circle Geometric line Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the oil is nearly gone and I will not tell this twice. The stag in this tale grew so proud in the valley of Ammur that his antlers spread wider than any gate, and the swallows built their nests in them, and the lilies turned their faces up to be admired by him.

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There was a beetle that lived beneath the stones at the foot of the hill, a plain brown rolling thing that pushed the dawn across the sky each morning, and it knew the sky was round because it had rolled it. The stag laughed at him. "A round thing is only a thing with no corners to catch on," he said, and he tossed his head so the flowers shivered. The beetle said nothing. He only asked for a thread of spider silk and a day's patience.

So the stag stood still while the beetle laced his branches together with silk, from tine to tine, and drew straight lines from one lily to one bird to the next, until the whole sky over the valley was a net of crossing lines meeting at points no one could name. The stag grew restless. He lowered his great head to see the centre of the circle, the threads tightened, and the beetle, who had been waiting, climbed the highest line, spread his wings over the middle of it all, and measured.

Now the stag stands at the foot of the circle for ever, and he does not lift his head higher than the lilies. The swallows still nest in his antlers, and each dawn, when the light comes up over the hill, the beetle rolls a little of it down the lines to the valley floor, so that everything that grows there sits exactly as far from the centre as it ought to.