Black and grey tattoo of a stag head with antlers and roses with leaves on the upper thigh, shown in a close photo of the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and roses on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head with branched antlers faces left at the centre of the design, with two roses set into the antlers. A cluster of roses, buds and leaves surrounds the lower half of the head. The deer's face and muzzle use soft shading, while the flowers and leaves use outlined linework with grey shading.

Realism Botanical Thigh Stag Deer Antler Rose Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Lantern Palais had given up on the waltz by ten o'clock, so when the caretaker's wife climbed the stage steps with a bucket of roses, nobody thought to stop her. You were leaning on the piano with a lemonade gone warm, watching Walter Pike pretend he was not watching you. Above the bandstand the old stag's head had hung since the war, its glass eyes gone the colour of weak tea, and Mrs Hale began winding roses into its antlers as though dressing a Christmas tree.

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"Somebody has to make the old fellow look like he's going somewhere," she said around the pins in her mouth. You laughed, and the laugh carried, and Walter crossed the floor in three long strides before the record could finish. He asked you to dance the plain way men in that town asked things, looking at your shoes first and then at your face. You said yes before he could take it back.

You danced the foxtrot, then the quickstep, until the sweat came through your good blouse and the fallen petals lay on the parquet like small red coins. Somewhere in the second half of the set Walter stopped steering and simply held on, and you let him, because the stag looked down at the floor with its patient painted face and nothing about the evening needed explaining.

When the last waltz came round, you slipped into the cloakroom and waited until the lights went down in the hall. Then you climbed the back stairs to the bandstand, took one bud from the antlers, and tucked it inside your glove. It was still cool from the cellar. Outside, the lamps along the front were coming on one by one, and you walked home knowing you would tell this to nobody but the stag.