Black ink tattoo of a stag-headed man in a long coat holding a cane, in an engraved hatched style, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag-headed gentleman on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag-headed figure in a long coat and trousers stands upright, holding a cane in one hand, drawn as a figure in a vintage engraving. The linework is fine and dense, with the coat and trousers built up from parallel hatching and shading, and the antlers rendered in thin strokes. The design is in black ink only, shown against a floral patterned fabric in the background.

Forearm Stag Antler Man Suit Engraving

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worn the same grey coat since the autumn the pilots stopped coming in past the breakwater, and the cane has never once touched a cobble that did not deserve it. Harbourmaster Pell says you hold yourself like a man expecting a summons. You do not correct him. The antlers catch the fog before anything else does, and in Saltmarrow that is reckoned a kind of office.

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Every Tuesday you walk the quay to the fish market and pay the widow Abernethy eleven pence for a herring you do not eat. She wraps it in yesterday's Gazette. You have read that paper for thirty years and know which births and drownings it will print before the ink is dry. Last Tuesday it printed your own name beside a sum you do not recall owing, and you folded the page into the lining of your coat with the others.

On the seventh night of the gale the lamp at the point guttered, and a schooner with no lights came feeling toward the rocks. You went out along the wet stone without hurrying, cane tapping, and stood where the swell broke white. You raised a lantern you had carried for no reason until then. The helmsman saw a tall shape with a crown of branches and hauled wide of the reef, and he has cursed you in three taverns since.

Nobody in Saltmarrow has ever paid you back for it, and you have never asked them to. The following Tuesday the widow Abernethy handed you the herring without being asked, and you paid her the eleven pence anyway, because a gentleman settles his accounts.