Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head in black and grey linework

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag's head in right-facing profile, with large branching antlers and a long neck that fades into a solid black shape at the base. Bold black areas are set against white scrolls and curls that trace the jaw, brow and neck, giving an ornamental, tribal-influenced look. The image is a monochrome pencil or ink drawing on white paper, with no colour and no body visible.

Blackwork Stag Deer Antler Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, and mind the fire, it has a temper like my uncle. The stag came down to the ford at Harrowmere the autumn the river turned black, and he came without fear, which was the first wrong thing. Every man in the valley knew the stag with the crown of burnt branches, because he had outlived three generations of hunters and kept a white scroll of frost along his neck where the arrows had glanced.

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Old Brannoc the smith was the one who swore he could see the ornament on the stag's jaw. He said the whorls and curling fern-leaves were not hair or bone but carved lines, the work of some older people who had cut signs into the beasts so that the forest would know its own. Brannoc had made a bronze cup for the chieftain's wife, and on its rim he had hammered the same curling shapes, and the cup had never once held water without spilling a little over the lip.

So the chieftain's son went down to the ford with a spear and a rope of braided horsehair. He waited three days in the reeds. On the fourth morning the stag lifted its head from the water, looked at him across the grey current, and did not run. It only turned its great black neck, slowly, the way a man turns to show you the face on a coin, and waited.

The son lowered his spear. He never told anyone what he saw in that stillness, only that when he climbed out of the reeds his hands were empty and his hair had gone the colour of frost. Brannoc says the stag was simply tired of being hunted by men who had forgotten what the carved signs were for.