Colour tattoo of a stag head with black branch-like antlers and a stippled black moon above it, placed on the upper arm.

Stag with branch antlers and moon on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stag's head sits at the centre of the design, with its antlers drawn as thin black lines that branch out like bare tree limbs and frame a dark, dotted moon above. The deer's face and muzzle are filled with soft red and brown shading, while the outlines and antlers use bold black linework. The composition is centred on the upper arm, with the moon stippling providing contrast against the lighter skin.

Dotwork Neo-trad Upper arm Stag Deer Antler Moon Branches Tree

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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 lift has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the shopping knocking against your shins, nine floors of concrete smelling of bleach and somebody's chips. On the eighth landing the window is cracked in a star, and through it the car park has gone silver under a moon the colour of wet slate.

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Something is standing between the bins. At first you take it for a bin bag snagged on a railing, then it lifts its head and the head is a stag's, red-brown in the sodium light, its antlers spreading up and out in bare black branches that catch on the lamp posts like washing lines. Nobody else on the estate looks up. Mrs Okafor's ginger cat watches from the wall, unbothered.

Your nan used to say the deer came down from the old forest when the estate was new, before the motorway cut the woods in two, and that they only came to people who had something to set down. You have a carrier bag of shopping and a letter from the council you have not opened. The stag steps over the low wall and its antlers rake across the moon, and for a second the moon is a hole punched in the sky with the night showing through.

By the time you reach the ninth floor the car park is empty except for a single hoof print in the frost on the roof of a neighbour's hatchback. You open the letter at the kitchen table. It is a rent review, a small number, nothing a stag could fix. You fold it back up and go to the window to see if it is still there. It is not. There are only the sycamore branches, bare and black, and the moon sitting in them as if it had always been meant to be caught.