White dotwork drawing of a stag skull with antlers, a crescent moon, crossed holly sprigs and vertical tally marks on a black background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag skull with crescent moon and holly

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag skull with full antlers sits in front of a stippled crescent moon, with holly sprigs with berries crossing beneath it. A vertical column of short horizontal strokes, resembling tally marks, runs down from the crossed stems. The drawing uses white dotwork and fine line on a solid black ground, with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Antler Crescent moon Berry Tally marks

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gwen had been keeping the tally on the back of the drug round sheet since Boxing Day, one stroke for each night shift on Ward 9, a bundle of four with a slash through. By the third week of January the sheet looked like a fence someone had started and abandoned. Outside the sluice room window the moon had thinned to a paring again, and the holly her sister had pinned above the handwash sink was browning at the edges.

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Nobody on nights believed in much except the tea urn and the lift that stuck between four and five. Old Mr Ashdown in bed six did. He had been a gamekeeper on the Quantocks before his hips gave out, and every night at two he asked her whether the stag had come down off the hill yet. She told him it hadn't. He said it would when the moon sat in the right shoulder, and then the antlers would be wanted for something.

On the last night of the month he did not wake for the two o'clock obs. Gwen sat with him until the window greyed, counting his breaths the way she counted strokes, and when the day staff came in with their coats still zipped she found she had drawn one more mark on the sheet without meaning to. It was not a night. It was a line drawn under the rest.

She folded the sheet into her locker, took the holly from the sink, and walked out past the revolving doors into a car park furred with frost. Somewhere beyond the bypass, she thought, a stag would be standing very still on the hill, waiting for someone to come up and count him in.