Black and grey dotwork stag head with antlers and a wireframe geometric shape on the inner forearm.

Stag head and geometric shape on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is tattooed on the forearm, with its fur built up from fine stippled dots. Behind the antlers sits a wireframe geometric solid drawn with clean, thin lines. The piece is entirely black and grey and is shown against a dark wooden wall, with the arm held up and the hand clenched in the lower part of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Fine line Forearm Stag Deer Antler Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag had stood in the theodolite's crosshairs for twenty minutes before Ruth admitted it was not a survey marker. It stood on the ridge above the Glen Fyne track, head high, and between its antlers hung a wireframe shape of thin white lines, slowly turning as though someone had strung it there on fishing line. She had sat her night-school exam on solids of twenty faces. She counted the edges twice, got thirty, and wrote every vertex into the field book in pencil so the rain could not run it.

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Dougal laughed when she showed him the page. The hill had old sheep folds and a cairn that the Ordnance sheet put in the wrong place, and that was all, he said. He told her to stop reading the flasks of tea as omens. Ruth went back alone at dusk with a torch she did not switch on. The stag came down to the burn and lowered its head to drink, and the shape sank into the water and lay there like a lantern, every line bright on the black surface. She took a bearing from the cairn. It ran due north, straight through the middle of the road the council had already paid for.

In the morning she redrew the alignment so it bent around the hill in a long, careful curve, and she signed the change with her own initials. In the margin of the sheet, beside the new contour, she drew the stag in fine stippled dots, then the thin wire of the shape above its antlers, and wrote the grid reference of the place where it drank. Under that she added one line: leave this one standing.