Black and grey tattoo of a stag's head with large antlers on the inner forearm, shaded with dotted texture on the face and fine lines on the fur.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head with antlers on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head faces the viewer, with its antlers extending above the top edge of the forearm and its neck and chest fur fading into the lower part of the design. The face and fur are built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines, with soft grey shading around the eyes, nose and ears. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred on the forearm against a plain light background with a dark sleeve at the left.

Dotwork Forearm Stag Deer Antler Animal Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag was already standing in the car park of the old grammar school when the coaches pulled in, beside the bins as if it had been booked for the evening. Nobody from the year above remembered a stag at the school. Mrs Adair, who had taught geography for thirty years, said it had come down off the moor every autumn since the fire in the science block, and that you let it be.

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The men who had been boys together in the fourth form went out to look at it. Dennis Carrow, who had sat behind Peter Ollard in every lesson and had never once given him the answer he needed, walked up slowly with his hands in his pockets. The stag did not move. Its eyes were dark and wet and had the patience of something that had watched a great many people fail to leave a place. Its coat was grey at the throat and thinned into fine strokes of shadow, like the hatching on a map of hills.

Carrow said he was sorry about the bicycle. The stag turned its head, and in the light from the hall windows its antlers were black against the sky, branching wider than the gutter. Then it looked at Ollard, who had not said anything at all, and waited. Ollard said the thing he had carried for thirty years, and the stag lowered its head once, as a judge might, and walked back through the gate towards the moor.

Inside, the buffet was going cold and the DJ was playing the song from the leavers' disco. Nobody mentioned the stag again. But the next morning Ollard's wife found the grass by the bins flattened in a wide ring, and at its centre a single grey hair, fine as a pencil stroke, which she put in an envelope and kept on the windowsill.