Black and grey stag head tattoo with red-tinted antlers, a mandala ornament and feathers, placed on the outer upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and mandala on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stag's head with large antlers sits at the top of the design, with an ornate mandala on its forehead and a larger mandala below it. Feathers or arrow shapes radiate outward beneath the mandala, with pink and red shading at the antler tips and feather ends. Most of the work is fine black and grey shading, with the colour concentrated in the lower and upper accents.

Realism Geometric Thigh Stag Deer Antler Mandala Feather Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag had been standing in the snow since before the coach stopped, and by the time you carried the lamp down to the yard it had come no closer to the inn than the water trough. Its antlers caught the light and threw it back in pale branches. Someone had knotted a scrap of red wool around one tine, and it lifted and fell in the wind off the moor.

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Your father said it was the same beast that had wintered in the old orchard every year since the flood, and that it should be left alone. Mrs Ashdown in room four said otherwise. She had been reading tea leaves by the fire since the pass closed, and she claimed the stag was waiting for someone who owed it a debt. You rolled your eyes until she pressed a folded envelope into your hand. On it, in faded pencil, was written: Tobias Greave, Lantern Cottage, 1841.

You took the envelope out to the trough at midnight, the lamp hissing in your fist. The snow had stopped and the moor was so still you could hear the animal breathing. You set the envelope on the stone rim and stepped back. The stag lowered its great head, pressed its muzzle to the paper, and when it lifted again the envelope was gone, leaving only a single feather, pink at the tip, frozen into the ice.

By morning the road was open and the stag was nothing but tracks climbing uphill into the grey. Mrs Ashdown was already at breakfast, her teacup turned upside down on its saucer. She did not look up when you set the feather beside her plate. "Greave paid his debts," she said. "He just never said in what coin."