Watercolour-style stag head with large antlers in purple, blue, pink and green, tattooed on the inner forearm of a person wearing a dark top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour stag on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is drawn in loose outlines and filled with washes of purple, blue, pink and green that bleed and drip down the neck. The colour fades softly at the edges, with the antlers left more open and the muzzle more defined. The design sits centrally on the forearm against a plain pale wall, with the person's dark top and jeans at the right edge of the frame.

Forearm Stag Deer Antler Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came over the top of the orchard at four, as it always did in the last week of August, and Nell Harrow ran the length of the rows with her paint box clamped under her coat. The stag was half finished on the press-house wall. She had drawn its outline in charcoal that morning, the antlers spreading like a bare hedge against the plaster, and filled the neck with washes she had mixed from jam jars: plum, Prussian blue, and a pink she had found at the bottom of her aunt's tin and never liked.

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Her brother Tom sat on the bottom rung of the ladder with a crate of Discovery apples between his knees. "You'll spoil it," he said. "It's meant to run," she said, though she hadn't meant it to run quite so fast. The water loosened the blue and drew it down the stag's throat in threads, and the pink went after it, pooling where the wall met the cobbles. Tom laughed for the first time all week and said the stag looked as if it had been out in the weather for a hundred years.

The man from the estate agents was due on Monday to measure the press house for sale, and he wanted the walls scraped back to brick. Nell had argued, then stopped arguing, because the orchard was going regardless and she had decided to leave something behind that would not be sold. She stood in the rain until the last of the charcoal lines ran into the wash and the head was only a shape of colour.

On Monday the stag was gone from the wall, scraped to a grey ghost of brick, but the drips had reached the grass and dried there in purple rings around the cider barrels. The estate man stepped carefully around them. Tom left the crate of apples on the step for her, and she kept one in the bottom of her bag, the skin still faintly blue where her thumb had pressed it.