Small black fine line tattoo of a stag head with antlers on a finger, shown in a black and white photo of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a stag's head with branching antlers sits on the side of one finger. The linework is thin and dark, with light shading along the skull at the base of the antlers. The photograph is black and white and shows the hand close up against a plain, softly blurred background.

Fine line Hand Stag Antler Skull Deer

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the gap in the tarpaulin by ten, so nobody browsed the stall that morning. I sat on an upturned crate at the back of Coldharbour Market with my uncle's brass scales in one hand and a sack of shed antlers at my boots, sorting them by weight because it gave my hands something to do. Shed antlers come off the forestry tracks above Wenlow every spring, pale where the damp has got into them. Uncle Ivor used to say they were worth more than the timber.

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Mrs Pennock came under the awning just after eleven, shaking her umbrella over my boots. She carried a biscuit tin and set it on the trestle without opening it. "I want to trade," she said. Inside, wrapped in tissue gone soft as bread, was a plain gold band worn thin on one side. "My Ronald's. He's been dead nine years and the ring's been in a drawer. I'd rather have something from the hill. Something that grew."

I offered her the six-point, the big one with the notched brow tine. She shook her head and pointed at a small sprig no longer than my palm, two thin tines and a broken third. "That one. A stag drops his antlers when the days shorten and grows them back bigger every year, like he's forgotten the last lot. Ronald would have liked that. He never forgot anything, mind."

I took the ring home that night and set it on the windowsill beside the lamp. Next morning, before the market, I sat at the kitchen table with a jeweller's loupe, a scribe and the little antler, and cut a stag's head no wider than a fingernail: a skull at the base, the tines branching out thin as ink. I shaded the bone with a dot of soot. Outside the rain kept coming, and I left the window open a crack so the ring could hear it.