Black stag head with antlers above a fine line triangle motif, tattooed on the hand and wrist area in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head and triangles on a hand

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black stag head with branching antlers sits on the hand, with a fine line geometric motif of interlocking triangles beneath it. The stag is rendered in dense black and grey shading, while the triangles use thin, precise linework. The hand is photographed from above against a grey concrete floor, with leopard print shoes visible at the bottom edge.

Geometric Blackwork Hand Stag Antler Deer Triangle Geometric shape Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The stag came down off the moor the week after the survey pegs went in, and Mr Garside says that is no coincidence. He keeps a ledger of everything that walks across the estuary, and he has written the beast's arrival beside the new triangulation station, as if the two were in league. I told him a stag has no interest in brass plates. He told me that was exactly what a stag would want us to think.

We had been laying out the triangles for the harbour wall since March. Three stations, each one a point on a sum that only closed if the angles were true. Every morning the mist came up off the water and every morning I walked out with the theodolite and the chain, and every morning the antlered thing was standing a little nearer the pegs, watching the instrument the way a clerk watches a man counting coins.

On the last day the sums closed perfectly, and when I looked up it was gone. Only the prints remained in the silt, the cloven marks running straight through the middle of our smallest triangle and out the other side, as if it had walked the lines we had drawn to see whether they would hold.

Garside has made a fair copy of the chart and pinned it above his desk. The triangles interlock like hands, he says, and the stag is standing in the one place none of us measured. I have kept the chain. Come down when the tide is out and I will show you where the prints stop.

Yours, Tom