Neo-traditional stag head tattoo on a forearm, with grey shading, bold black outlines, orange eyes and red blush accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head tattoo on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers faces forward, filling the arm from the elbow area down. The head is shaded in soft greys with a fine stippled texture on the muzzle and fur, outlined in heavy black lines. Small areas of red and orange add accents to the eyes and the background behind the antlers, against a dark background.

Neo-trad Forearm Stag Deer Antler Animal

Find an artist for this

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 bell in the ruined chapel had not rung since the roof fell in, but Maud Renshaw still climbed the broken stair each dusk to check the rope stayed dry. It was the stag she was waiting for. Every October it came down off the moor through the gatehouse arch, antlers branching black against the last of the light, and stood in the nave where the altar had been, as though it were the lord of the place and the castle had merely forgotten to tell anyone.

Keep reading

She had never expected it to look at her. Deer did not look at people the way this one did, steady and unbothered, its eyes catching the lamp like two coals pushed into ash. The villagers said the stag had been there before the Harrowmere family, before the siege that split the keep, and that whoever lit a fire for it on the midwinter night would be spared the fever that took the mill children. Maud thought that was nonsense. Still, she had lit the fire three winters running, and the fever had passed her by.

This year the fire went out before the moon cleared the wall. She knelt in the wet ash, cursing her matches, and when she looked up the stag had walked to the very edge of the lamplight, its grey muzzle furred and pale, a faint red glow pooling behind its antlers like a sunset that had lost its way. It lowered its head towards the cold hearth and waited.

So Maud did what her grandmother had done. She unbuttoned her coat, took out the last of the Christmas candles, set it on the stone between them, and the stag breathed on the wick until it caught.