Black and grey tattoo of a stag whose antlers grow into leafy branches across the ribs and stomach of a torso shown in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag with antler branches across ribs and stomach

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head and neck are drawn in fine black linework with light shading on the fur and ears, set against the side of the torso. Its antlers extend upward into branches with small outlined leaves that spread across the ribs and upper abdomen. The image is a black and white photograph cropped at the chest and hips, with the navel visible in the centre-right of the frame.

Realism Botanical Ribs Stag Deer Antler Branches Leaves Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had clocked the stag at twenty to two, standing on the wet pavement outside the shut bakery on Carrick Street, as if it had wandered out of the park and got lost on the way to somewhere quieter. Its neck was dark against the sodium light. Its antlers ran up into the plane tree above the bus shelter, and where the branches thinned, small outlined leaves had come through, stiff and careful, like the first drawings of a child who has just learned what a leaf is.

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She was walking home from the night shift at the laundry with a bag of hospital uniforms over one shoulder. Nobody else seemed to notice the animal. A taxi swung past without slowing, and a man pushing a trolley of cans stepped round its hooves without breaking his tune. Nell stood still, because her mother had always said you did not walk up to a wild thing in the city any more than you would in the wood, and because the stag turned its head and looked at her as though she owed it an answer.

'I've nothing for you,' she said. It breathed out a cloud into the cold, then crossed the road at a slow walk, the leaves on its antlers shivering with each step. She followed at a distance, past the launderette and the shuttered florist, until it stopped under the railway arch where the ivy had spread over the brickwork in green lace. It lowered its head and nosed at the stone. Where its breath touched the wall, the ivy went white for a moment, like frost on a window, then dark again.

By the time the sky greyed over the tower blocks, the stag had gone and the pavement was dry in a ring beneath the arch. Nell went home and slept until noon. When she woke, a single new leaf was caught on the cuff of her coat, pale and perfectly veined, and she pinned it to the corkboard above the kettle, because it seemed rude not to.