Black ink drawing of a stag with pink poppies and blossom woven through its antlers, shown on a white background as a tattoo design.

Stag with pink flower antlers

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A stag's head faces forward, with its ears and fur drawn in fine black stippling and hatched linework. Pink poppies, a peony and clusters of small blossoms wrap around the antlers. The subject is isolated on a plain white background with no body or setting shown.

Botanical Stag Deer Antler Flower Poppy Peony Blossom

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

Kallis had two sons and one ewe left at the end of the hard winter, because the wolves had taken the rest. He climbed the north slope with a bow he could barely draw, since the old men said the spring above the pines belonged to a stag that had never been killed.

Keep reading

He found the stag at dusk, standing still in the water with its head held high. Its antlers were bare of velvet and hung with small pink blossoms that did not wilt, and between the tines a poppy opened as he watched. Kallis lowered the bow. The stag did not run. It bent to drink, and when it lifted its head a petal fell on the water and drifted to Kallis's feet.

"Every one you bring home is a life you owe," the stag said, in a voice like wind across a reed bed. "Take a flower instead. Wear it where your sons can see it." Kallis asked how a flower would feed anyone. The stag only shook its head, so that the blossoms touched each other with a sound like small bells, and Kallis understood he had been offered a bargain whose price he did not yet know.

He went down the hill empty-handed. The next morning the wolves came to the fold, found the ewe behind a fence of ash poles and two dogs that had not slept, and went away again. Each spring after, Kallis climbed to the spring and came down with a poppy tucked behind his ear, and his sons grew up knowing that the flowers on the stag were the names of everything the hills had given back.