Black and grey dotwork tattoo on the inner forearm showing a stippled running deer and a stick-like hunter with a spear, in a cave painting style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stippled deer and hunter on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of figures is tattooed on pale skin near the wrist: a stag leaping to the left, built from dense stippled dots, and a simple stick-like human figure to the right holding a long spear or arrow. The dotwork forms have a rough, primitive outline, similar to rock art, and sit apart with plenty of open skin between them. The image is entirely black and grey, with a plain light background.

Dotwork Forearm Deer Stag Spear Arrow Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag came down to the water at the bend below Ashford Lock every February, when the ice was thin and the reeds stood grey. Old Teague Marr, who worked the narrowboat Halcyon, said it had been doing so since before the locks were cut, and that his grandfather had seen it clear the weir in a single bound. Every winter a hunter went after it. None of them ever caught it, and the stag never seemed to mind.

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One year the hunter was a lad named Piers, sixteen and sharp about everything, who had signed on as bow-hand that spring. He carried a long ash spear because his father had carried one, and he asked Teague why nobody had ever simply sat still by the water and waited. Teague told him the stag was not the kind of animal you waited for. You walked after it until the water ran out.

They tracked it three days along the towpath, past the brickworks and the flooded orchards, until the cut narrowed and the light turned the colour of pewter. On the last evening the stag stood on the far bank, breath smoking, and looked at Piers for a long time without moving. Then it bent its neck and drank, and Piers found he could not lift the spear. He lowered it. The stag went over the reeds in one stride and was gone.

Teague said nothing for a while. Then he poled the Halcyon back towards Ashford, and at the lock he told the boy that the hunt had never been for the meat. It was so a man would know where the water was. Piers laid the spear across the cabin roof, where it stayed until the thaw, and in the mud of the towpath the hoofprints filled slowly with rain.