Black and grey dotwork stag with antlers, a Deathly Hallows symbol and the number 9 3/4 above a geometric triangle, tattooed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag with Deathly Hallows on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stag's head and shoulders sit at the centre of the design, with antlers framing a Deathly Hallows symbol and the text 9 3/4 above. The stag is shaded with fine dots and fur-like strokes, and a dotted line curves around its neck and down to a layered geometric triangle at the base. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and is shown in a full view on the forearm and in a close-up of the stag.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Stag Deer Antler Deathly hallows Triangle Circle Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the last winter before the rail lines were pulled up, old Mabry Coyle kept watch over a stag in the hollow behind the signal box, because nobody else in Thornwick would go near it. It came down from the chalk hills each night with antlers like dead branches, and it never once looked at a lamp. The children said it was the keeper of the crossing, and the elders said it was only a deer that had learned where the warm pipes ran under the old platform.

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The trouble came in the spring the grid failed. Pell Ostrin, who ran the salvage gangs, wanted the copper from the rails and the pipes beneath them, and he sent two boys with a handcart to strip the hollow. They found the stag standing across the track with a triangle of bent iron hanging between its antlers, a ring of wire around its neck, and a thin dotted chain of rivets running down to a heap of grey slabs. Each slab was cut to a point, like arrowheads laid end to end.

The boys tried to shift it. It did not run. It only lowered its head until its breath moved the dust between the rails, and the older boy, Tam, felt the chain of rivets go warm against his palm. He said afterwards that he heard a train whistle from a line that had been dead for forty years, and that the whistle came out of the stag's chest. Ostrin's boys walked home with empty carts, and nobody sent them back.

Mabry says the stag still stands there, and that the platform numbers scratched on the old board are waiting for someone to step onto the right one. Nobody in Thornwick has tested it. They leave the copper alone, and when the wind comes off the chalk they say the stag is counting the carriages, and that it has never once got to the end.