Black and white flash design of a stag head silhouette with hand-lettered text reading We will forever be wild and free over a row of pine trees.

Stag silhouette with lettering and pine trees

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black stag head silhouette with branching antlers faces forward on a white background. White hand-lettered text reading "We will forever be wild & free" sits within the body of the silhouette, with small leaf-like sprigs and a row of pine trees along the bottom. The image uses flat black fill and white negative space with no shading, giving a bold, woodcut-style composition.

Lettering Stag Deer Antler Lettering Quote Pine tree Tree Silhouette Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The foreman has been at you since Monday about the stag. "It's been in the yard three mornings running," Mr Hollis says, rolling a cigarette he will not light inside the mill, "and the Pryce boy swears it ate his mother's washing." You tell him deer don't eat sheets. You say little else, because you have already decided what you will do, and it is not what he wants.

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Before light you come down the Wenlock road with the lantern turned low. The mill sits where the pines thin out onto the moor, and the stag is there beside the stacked timber, its antlers black against the grey sky, branching like the dead ash by the weir. It does not run. It looks at you the way the old schoolmaster looked at a sum he already knew was wrong. There is a bolt-gun key in your coat pocket and no intention of using it. You unlatch the back gate instead and step aside.

By nine Hollis has the rifle out. You tell him the gate was open, the yard empty, the tracks heading up through the larches toward the fells. He studies the marks in the sawdust, long and neat as stitching, then looks at you, and for once he says nothing at all. He just goes back to his saw.

That evening you walk past the last cottage and sit on the stone wall above the pines. Below, the town lights come on one by one. Somewhere up the slope a stag calls, a sound like a gate swinging on a bad hinge, and you stay until the stars show through the branches and the lettering on the mill sign has gone too dark to read. You know the words anyway. Wild and free, you think, and you go home.