Small solid black stag head tattoo with antlers on the upper back near the neck, shown in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head silhouette on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a stag's head with branching antlers sits on the upper back, close to the base of the neck. The design uses filled black shapes with minimal interior detail, and the photograph is in black and white. The tattoo is centred on a plain area of skin with some hair visible at the top of the frame.

Blackwork Back Stag Deer Antler Silhouette Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair reached Maidstone a day late, so the Gallopers were already turning when you climbed the ladder to the centre pole. Ezra Pell had told you on your first morning that the stag at the crown of that pole was not to be touched, not repainted, not gilded like the horses. Its head was black as a stove lid, and its antlers branched out over the canopy like dead hedgerow in winter.

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In the third week of September a gust took the left tine clean off, and it landed in the sawdust beside the generator. You picked it up, its tip still sharp, and carried it to Ezra's caravan with both hands, expecting a bollocking. He turned it over under the lamp for a long while. 'My father carved that from a bit of ash off the Downs,' he said. 'The black was only to keep the damp out.'

He sent you up with a tin of glue and a length of copper wire. Forty feet above the midway, with the organ grinding out 'Roses of Picardy' below, you bound the tine back to the crown, your fingers stiff with cold. When you came down the crowds had thinned and the lamps were going out one by one along the rows. Looking back, you saw the stag's silhouette thrown huge onto the white canvas of the dodgems tent, its head lifting as the last generator coughed and died.

Ezra was waiting at the foot of the ladder with two mugs of tea. 'Good,' he said. 'Now it can go on without us.' You didn't ask what he meant. By morning the wagons were rolling towards Ashford, and the stag stood alone on the empty field, black against the hedge, waiting for the next town to find it.