Line drawing in green ink of a stag's head with large antlers, framed by pine branches, pine cones and distant mountains, in a botanical flash style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag head within pine branches and cones

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A stag's head faces left in profile, with a full set of branching antlers that rise above the frame. It is framed by pine boughs and pine cones, with a small mountain range visible behind the animal's neck. The image uses fine, engraving-like hatching and crosshatching in a single green ink on a white background, with an oval arrangement of foliage around the subject.

Botanical Stag Deer Antler Pine cone Mountain Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hinds came down off the hill the week the snow shut the upper road, and my father said that meant the stag would follow, the way it always did in a hard year. He said it while scraping ice off the trough with the back of a shovel, not looking at me, the way he said most things that mattered.

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I found the stag on the Tuesday, at the edge of the plantation where the spruce runs down to the dyke. I had a bale on my shoulder and the ewes were shouting behind the shed, and when I looked up he was simply there, standing in the blue light with his head turned towards the slope. His antlers rose higher than the top rail of the gate. Frost had caught on every tine, so they looked like old silver, and behind his neck the hills ran off in pale ridges, one behind another, as if someone had inked them with a fine pen and never finished.

I thought of the almanac on our kitchen wall, which has a picture like it: a stag inside a ring of fir boughs, cones hanging from the bottom, the lines so close together they read as grey from across the room. My mother used to say it was the only thing in the house that was never cold. I went back for the bale because the ewes needed it, and when I looked again the stag was gone. Only a line of prints ran off through the snow towards the trees.

On the Friday there was a sprig of spruce nailed to the byre door, three cones tied on with orange string. My father swore he had not done it, and I stopped asking. Now I leave the salt lick by the gate where the wind can reach it, and some mornings there are hoof marks in the drift beside it, set down neatly, as if someone were checking my work.