Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stag wearing a knitted collar, suit jacket and tie, on the front of a lower leg.

Stag in a suit on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A stag with large antlers and a knitted collar is shown wearing a suit jacket and tie, from the head down to a point at the bottom. The design uses fine stippled dots and short strokes for shading, with heavier black on the antlers and the top of the head. The tattoo is in black and grey on a calf, photographed against a pale floor with a pair of flip-flops beside the leg.

Dotwork Calf Stag Deer Antler Suit Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The rain has been coming down on Pennant Street since six, and the tarpaulin over my stall sags like a wet sail. I thought you'd want to hear about the stag. He came in on Tuesday with his antlers wrapped in a feed sack, and he asked, very politely, for a suit that would not look out of place at a christening. I measured his shoulders with the cloth tape, though I had to guess where his shoulders ended and his chest began.

He wanted a knitted collar in dark green, and a tie the colour of slate. Mr Halloran from the bric-a-brac next door says a stag in a suit is a joke for the tourists, but the stag never once laughed. He stood on my oilcloth for an hour while I pinned the lapels, shifting his weight the way a man does when he is waiting for a bus he has already missed. I stippled the wool texture with a dry pen, one tiny dot at a time, because the cloth needed to look as if it had been brushed by the wind.

On Friday the sky finally cleared, and I hung the finished jacket on the rail for him to collect. He came up the street at dusk with his antlers held high, past the fish van and the flower buckets, and I watched him stop beneath the lamp outside the chemist. The rain had freshened the pinstripes so they gleamed like wet pencil. He turned his head once, looked back at my stall, and walked on into the dark without a single drop of water falling from his collar.

Love, Ada