Watercolour-style tattoo of a stag's head with antlers on the shoulder, in brown, pink and teal washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour stag on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A stag's head with branching antlers is tattooed on the upper back and shoulder, drawn with loose, painterly outlines. The head is filled with soft brown, dark red and pink washes, with teal and green splashes trailing below the neck and across the antlers. The pale, plain background keeps the tattoo as the clear focus of the photo.

Shoulder Deer Stag Antler Watercolour Splashes

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

The stag came over the sound on the morning the relief boat failed to appear. I saw him from the gallery, a dark head held above grey water, antlers branched like a winter tree. He swam the way my father crossed frozen ponds, slowly, testing every yard before he trusted it.

Keep reading

Harry Lowrie kept this light before me, and he left a tin of paint in the store: oxblood, a pink he called heather, and a teal he never explained. I had meant to use it on the railings. Instead I found myself painting the stag as he stood on the slipway, dripping and patient, working fast with a sable brush while rain ran off his neck. Where I wetted the colours they bled into each other, the way the light does on the water at dusk.

When the boat finally came, the skipper asked what I had been doing, and I showed him the wet page. He studied it for a long while, then said the stag had come to the island every winter since Harry's day, and that Harry had painted him too, once, before he went out after a drifting buoy and did not come back.

That night I climbed to the lamp and turned the beam on. Out past the rocks something moved in the swell, and where the light touched it the water broke into splashes of teal and rust, as if someone had flung a brush across the dark. The stag was gone by morning. I kept the paint.