Black dotwork drawing of a stag whose body is filled with a bare winter forest, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stag with forest design in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stag in profile with large branching antlers and a detailed face is drawn in stippled dotwork. Its body is filled with a forest of bare branches and dark conifer silhouettes, creating a double-exposure effect. The image is black ink on white paper, with a plain white background and the sheet resting on a dark grey surface.

Dotwork Stag Deer Antler Forest Tree Branches Conifer

Find an artist for this

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 stag came through the checkpoint at Sosnowa Pass at ten past four, which was the wrong hour for a deer and the wrong side of the fence for anything with antlers that size. I had the stamp in my hand before I decided whether to laugh. The man leading it, Ilya Varga from the timber cooperative, said the animal had walked out of the tree line on the Hungarian side and simply followed the road, the way a stray dog follows a lorry.

Keep reading

I checked his papers twice. A forestry permit, a livestock passport that did not cover antlers, and a letter from a notary in Miskolc describing the beast as a bequest. Behind him the pines stood black against a sky the colour of wet slate. The stag held its head high, nostrils working at the diesel fumes, and I could see the forest through its flank: bare birches threading down the shoulder, dark spruce stepping across the haunch, as though the trees had been poured into the animal and never quite drained out again.

The regulations had no box for it. I wrote Remarks, then sat with the pen above the paper while the barrier arm stayed up and the queue behind us grew restless. Varga asked what I was going to put. I told him the truth, that I would put the number of antlers and leave the rest to the next officer, who would be bored and sensible and would stamp it without looking.

When they had gone, the road was empty and the verge smelled of cut needles. In the grey light I could still make out the faint trail of the stag's feet, and where they crossed the white line the tarmac was pricked with small marks, like someone had been counting the way out.