Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head with branched antlers

Mixed · Flash

A front-facing stag head with closed eyes, a black nose and large ears, its antlers branching into curling tips. The neck is rendered in fine, flowing hatched strokes like fur or feathers, with small teal leaf shapes hanging from it. The drawing is black and grey with soft teal accents, centred on a plain white background.

Stag Deer Antler Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate sticks in wet weather, so I lift it by the iron ring before I push, and that was how I first knew the stag had been through before me. Its hoofprints sat deep in the gravel by the rhubarb, toes sunk harder than heels, as if it had walked in slowly and had not wanted to wake anyone.

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It came most nights after that. I never saw it arrive. I'd find the sage bed nibbled and the bean canes leaning, and once, on the potting bench, a scatter of small teal leaves, each one as sharp at the tip as a fishhook. They clung to the stag's neck when it passed the old pear tree in the corner, and the wind carried them off into my beds. Its eyes were always shut. My nan used to say a creature that walks with its eyes closed trusts the ground more than it trusts you, and that you should leave it something.

So I did. Every evening I set a pail of windfalls by the wall and went in before dark. In the mornings the pail was empty, and the windfalls had been arranged along the path in a loose spiral, like the curl at the end of a fern. One morning there was no fruit at all. Instead, lying in the middle of the spiral, was a single branch of antler, pale as bone, its tines ending in tight green curls that had not yet turned to leaf.

I planted it at the foot of the pear tree that same afternoon, pushing it into the cold clay until only the tips showed. Nothing happened all winter. Then in April, when the frost had gone and the blackbirds were loud in the hedge, a thin green shoot came up from the soil at the base of the antler, and the next morning there were leaves on it the colour of pond water. I've left the gate unlatched every night since, and the sage is never touched now.