Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a leaping stag with a human face and arrows piercing its body, placed on the upper chest near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag with a human face and arrows on the shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A leaping stag with large branching antlers and a human face at its head is shown in mid-stride, with several arrows piercing its flank and back. The animal is built from fine stippled dots for shading and thin outlines for its legs and antlers, all in black ink and grey tones. The design sits across the upper chest and shoulder, with the body curving diagonally from the collarbone towards the upper arm.

Dotwork Shoulder Stag Deer Antler Arrow Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag comes down to the towpath each evening when the lock keeper lights his lamp, and you have learned to keep the bow of the boat turned away from it. Your father never believed the stories the bargemen told about the Carrow Deer, a beast with a face like a drowned sailor's, but he kept an old bow in the cabin all the same, its string gone to dust. Three arrows he pulled from his own shoulder the winter the ice came, and he would never say who had shot them.

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The Hollis reach runs straight for two miles past the mill, and on still nights the stag keeps pace with the barge, its long legs lifting through the mist above the reeds. You have counted the arrows on it, seven now, though you only ever saw four. Each season another has appeared, lodged in the flank as neatly as numbers on a hymn board, and each time the face beneath the antlers has turned a little further towards the water to watch you.

On the night the lamp failed to light at the lock, you tied off early and walked the towpath with the bow across your back. The stag stood waiting in the willows. Its eyes were your father's eyes, grey and patient, and it did not flinch when you drew.

You loosed the string into the dark behind it, and then you sat down in the wet grass and let it come close enough to breathe on your hands.