Fine line tattoo of a deer with a soft purple wash on the upper arm, with a thin connected line running down to a second small deer on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two deer tattoos on upper arm and ribs

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a leaping stag with long antlers drawn in thin, sketchy black linework on the upper arm, with a soft purple and pink wash inside its body. A continuous fine grey line runs from the arm across the side of the torso, ending in a smaller deer outlined on the ribs. The image is a close side view on bare skin against a plain, out-of-focus indoor background.

Fine line Upper arm Ribs Deer Stag Antler Line Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told to copy the herbal, not to draw the stag that leapt across the margin of folio nine. But the gardener had seen the animal on the hill above the mill, antlers catching the early frost, and Anselm's pen would not sit still. He mixed his ink from oak gall and a wash of crushed madder, and he sketched with thin strokes so the stag seemed half remembered, as if the vellum had only just been wiped clean of something else.

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The line came next. It ran from the stag's flank along the page and down the margin, a river or a drovers' road, until it reached the gutter. There he gave a second deer a smaller body, set low and turned back, as though it followed at a careful distance and had not yet decided to cross the fold.

Prior Hugh found him at vespers with ink on both cuffs. Hugh did not scold. He held the leaf to the candle and said the lines were too quick, that a true animal would never stand so still for a painter. Anselm said the stag was not standing. It was leaving, and the line was the road it had taken out of the cloister, and the small one had stayed behind to watch the gate.

In the morning the folio was gone from the herbal and the scriptorium window stood open to the cold. Only a pale thread of ink remained on the sill, where something had crossed the stone and dropped into the valley. In spring a doe's hoofprints appeared in the mud below the wall, and Anselm stood over them for a long time, pen in hand, and did not copy them down.