Mixed-colour stag head tattoo with grey shading, yellow dotwork accents and a fine line arrow on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and arrow on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stag head in grey shading sits at the centre of the forearm, set against a geometric panel of angular lines and a yellow stippled backdrop. Thin black linework branches above the antlers and forms an arrow below the design. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a dark top and framed pictures in the background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Stag Deer Arrow Dot Geometric shape Line Antler

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Saltby the week the lamps went up on the common, and Ada Pell, who worked the coconut shy, was the first to see the stag. It stood at the hedge line past the dodgems with its head held high, and the frost on the grass took the yellow of the bulbs so that every hair of it seemed to shine. Its antlers were thin and black and forked into points, and at the tip of each point sat a small bright knot, like stars strung on wire.

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Her uncle Sol, who had kept the rifle gallery since before the war, told her not to look straight at it. A stag that wears the sky, he said, is not for shooting. But Dennis Coyle had lost his week's wages at the card table and had a bow in the back of his van, and he said a beast was a beast. On the third night he drew at the hedge and loosed. The arrow flew up, straight and quiet, and did not come down. It hung above the antlers while the knots of light flared one by one until the whole thing looked like a net drawn tight.

The stag turned its head and looked at Dennis the way a schoolmaster looks at a boy who has not done his sums. Then it walked slowly across the field, through the yellow lamplight, and stepped into the painted boards of the rifle gallery, where it went flat and still among the tin ducks. Dennis went after it with a torch. He found only the arrow lying in the frost at his feet, its shaft cold and its fletching folded into the shape of a lamp post.

The fair packed up on Sunday and Dennis did not go with it. Sol said he stayed on the common all winter, scratching lines in the frost with a stick and muttering about stars. In spring, when Ada walked the field, she found the grass pressed flat in the shape of antlers, and beside it a single arrow standing point-first in the earth, its shaft still humming faintly as if it had only just stopped moving.