Dotwork stag head with antlers made of branches, roses and leaves, in black ink on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head with roses on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag or deer head in profile sits at the centre of the forearm, with its antlers formed from thin branches that sprout roses and leaves on either side. The animal's face and neck are built from fine stippled dots that create soft shading, while the rose petals and leaves use outlined linework with light shading. The design is in black ink only and wraps around the forearm against a plain, pale skin background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Stag Deer Antler Rose Leaves Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, same as everything else in this village. Aye, sit by the range. My father told this one about the Haswell pit, back when the men still went down on the morning shift with their snap tins under their arms.

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Dan Corrigan was the best hewer on the north face and the worst at keeping his mouth shut. One February he walked to the pithead with a sprig of wild rose stuck in his cap, and the lamp man laughed and asked whose garden he'd been robbing. Dan said the stag had told him to wear it. Nobody believed him, but nobody thought it strange either, because an old stag had been seen at the edge of the slag heaps for a month, standing dead still while the trains went by.

Then the roof came down in the low seam on the Tuesday. Eleven men were under it. Dan wasn't, because he'd gone back up for a pick he'd forgotten. Lying in the cold dust after the fall, he heard, so he swore on his mother's grave, a hoof on the stone above him, slow and deliberate, leading the rescue men to the one place where the timber still held. They dug through to the lads by dawn, and when the cage came up the stag was gone.

So the wives of the Haswell row still cut roses from the bank each spring and lay them on the pit gates. Nobody can say for certain why. But if you ever see roses growing thick along the old colliery wall, leave them be. The stag still walks there, counting the men who come up. Pass me that tin of tea, love. My throat's dry from talking.