Black outlined tattoo of two deer forming a heart shape with swirling lines on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two deer forming a heart on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of two stylised deer, one with antlers, whose outlines meet to form a heart shape. Thick black outlines with solid black areas are accented by thin swirling lines extending from the top and bottom of the heart. The design sits on the side of the torso against light skin, with a white shirt visible above it and a small amount of reddish tone in the skin around the lines.

Ribs Deer Antler Heart Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the dough still, Tomas, or it will sulk and rise flat by seven," said old Ida, not looking up from the slab where she was folding butter into the flour. The oven ticked as it heated. Beyond the back window of the bakery on Harrow Lane the sky was still the colour of wet slate, and the only other light came from the gas ring under the kettle.

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"Two deer used to come down the hill every morning, before the carts. A stag with a crown of antlers, and a doe with a plain grey coat and eyes like rain on stone. They ate the windfall apples under the Pyle orchard wall, nose to nose, and nobody ever saw them part. Your grandfather swore they could hear the first oven door from three fields off and that they waited for it."

She brushed flour from her wrists. "Then one winter the stag stopped coming. The doe kept walking down the lane anyway, to the same wall, and stood there in the frost with her breath going up in little clouds. Every morning I put out a heel of yesterday's loaf on the sill for her, and every morning it was gone by the time the sun came up."

Tomas, who had heard the story a dozen times and never once believed the ending, watched her take a small knife from the drawer. She scored a round of dough with two long curves that met at the bottom in a point, then cut two sweeping swirls from its top edge. When the loaf came out of the oven the crust had split along those lines and risen into the shape of a heart, two halves of a deer leaning together. Ida set it on the sill in the grey light and went back to her butter without a word.