Colour traditional tattoo of a stag's head with antlers inside an ornate gilded oval frame on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag in an ornate frame on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is shown in profile inside an oval frame decorated with scrolling green and gold ornament. The linework is bold and dark, with solid fills and smooth shading on the deer's face and neck. Colour ink dominates, with greens, golds, reds and muted pinks, and the tattoo fills the frame of the image on the upper thigh.

Traditional Thigh Stag Deer Antler Frame Ornament Oval

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down to the hut again on Tuesday, the same one with the snapped tine, and stood in the yard until Mrs Ferrier's dog gave up barking at it. I have the letter from the Commission in my apron pocket, folded four times, and I keep touching it the way you'd touch a sore tooth.

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You'll remember the picture frame that hung in the hall at Glenbrack, the one with the gilt scrollwork gone green at the corners. Father said the portrait inside was a lord's stag, shot in the year of the great frost, and that the frame had been painted over so many times nobody knew the wood. When the house was sold they left it on the wall. Last week I took it down and found the canvas gone, only a stag's head behind the glass, painted in pink and ochre, looking sideways as if someone had just called its name.

I put the frame in the cart and drove it up the pass to the cottage at Harrow Gap. Snow lay in the bends and the wheels slid on the turns. At the summit I stopped, lifted the glass out, and the real stag was standing in the road ten yards ahead, antlers catching the last of the light. It did not run. It looked at the frame, then at me, and I understood it had only wanted to be let out of the picture.

I have hung the empty frame on the cottage door now. The stag waits by the water trough most mornings, as if it has somewhere to be and is in no hurry to get there. Come up in spring if the road is open. Bring your boots and don't bring the solicitor. It has been looking after itself for longer than either of us has been alive. Your sister, Ailsa.