Black and grey stag head tattoo with long antlers across the back of a hand, with small letter tattoos on two fingers, in traditional and dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and antlers on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is tattooed across the back of the hand, with the head sitting over the middle finger knuckle. The linework is bold and dark, and the face and antlers are shaded with fine stippling that gives the fur and texture a grainy finish. Small single-letter tattoos sit on the index finger and the upper right finger, and the plain white background keeps the focus on the design.

Traditional Dotwork Hand Stag Deer Antler Letter

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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

Mrs Penhallow's boarding house on the front at Porthcarrow had a stag's head over the hall door, though nobody could say who had shot it or when. Its antlers caught the coats and hats of every guest for forty years, and when the Easter lodgers arrived in April they always laughed at the way it stared down at the umbrella stand. I kept the brass polished beneath it and gave it no more thought than the damp in the scullery.

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That was before Lowell Ashdown came up from London with a sketchbook and a bad cough and asked for the room with the sea view, the one above the stairwell where the stag could keep an eye on him. He drew it every morning before breakfast. Antlers first, then the wet black eyes, then the grain of the fur done in tiny dots of ink, a hundred dots for a single ear, until the paper looked as if it had been breathed on. I asked him once why he bothered with the dots. He said a stag is only ever as real as the ink you spend on it.

The week he left, he pressed a sealed envelope into my hand, addressed in his small square writing to the stag. I was ready to tease him about it, but inside was a single pressed fern and a note: on the next wet morning, tell the hall the tide is turning. I did not tell the hall anything. I simply opened the front door, and the sea came up the steps as far as the mat, grey and sudden, then drew back again as if it had been called home.