Black and grey stag head tattoo with wide antlers and an arrow running across them, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head with arrow across antlers on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head faces the viewer, with large antlers spreading outward and an arrow passing horizontally through the antler span. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the face and antlers that gives the design depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, centred on the upper back, with the person's head and shoulders partly visible and cropped.

Back Stag Deer Antler Arrow Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag walked up to the barrier at ten past four in the morning as though it had a booking. I was in the hut with a flask of tea gone cold, and I watched it through the glass: antlers wide as a hay cart, an arrow run clean through the span of them like a skewer through a kebab, and not a drop of blood on the shaft that I could see.

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Mr Pryce, who did thirty years on the Berwick side before his knees gave out, always said you could read a man's guilt in how he held his passport. The stag held nothing. It only looked at me with the patience of a creature that has outlived most of the people who ever aimed at it. I rang Carlisle. Carlisle asked whether it had a visa. I said it had a fletching and a grudge, and Carlisle laughed and hung up on me.

I lifted the barrier myself, since it seemed the least I could do. The stag stepped under, slow and unbothered, and stopped where the tarmac gave way to bracken. Then it turned its head so the arrow caught the sodium light, and I saw the nock had letters burned into it, half worn to nothing. They spelt my grandfather's initials. He had gone out over that ridge in 1958 with a bow he was too proud to admit he couldn't draw.

When the sun came up I opened the logbook. Under Vehicles I wrote Nothing to report. Under Livestock, after a long while, I wrote the time, then the word Returned, and I left the bracken to close over the hoofprints for whoever came looking next.