Black and grey dotwork and linework tattoo on an upper arm showing a stag head with antlers, a flying goose and a crystal cluster within dotted geometric lines.

Stag, goose and crystals on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head with antlers sits at the centre of the design, with a small bird perched above it and a goose in flight beneath. A branch, a moth or cocoon and a cluster of crystals are placed at the top and bottom, all framed by fine dotted lines forming a diamond shape. The work uses fine linework and stippled dotwork shading in black and grey on the upper arm.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Stag Antler Bird Moth Crystal Branch Geometric line Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag comes to the wall again at dusk, the way it did when your grandmother kept the bees, and it stands with its antlers caught in the low branch of the medlar as if it has forgotten how to step back out. You have stopped trying to shoo it. Mr Ashby says it is the last of the old herd that grazed the park before the railway came, and that it means nothing by it except hunger.

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The moth is the trouble. It has hung in its grey silk from the top twig since spring, a parcel no bigger than a thimble, and the blackbird keeps hopping round it. Your job, the one Mr Ashby gave you on the Monday, is to keep the bird off until the thing splits. Instead you spend the afternoons on the upturned trug, counting the pale triangles of quartz he keeps in a biscuit tin, each one dug from the spoil heap when the drains went in.

On the last Thursday of August a goose came down over the glasshouse, low and honking, and landed in the rhubarb as though it had been told the way. It shook its wings out, took one of the quartz pieces from the tin when you left the lid off, and went up again with a sound like a wet sheet snapping on a line. The stag lifted its head. You watched the goose drop the stone in the middle of the lawn, right where the sundial sat inside its ring of gravel.

By morning the cocoon at the top of the medlar was open and empty, a silver thread cut clean, and the stag had gone back over the wall into the park. Mr Ashby found you on the step with the tin in your lap. He did not ask about the stone. He only said the goose always knows which way the year is pointing, and that you should put the lid back on before the wasps find the sugar.