Colourful watercolour-style stag head tattoo with splashes of blue, pink and purple on the upper arm and shoulder.

Watercolour-style stag on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stag head with branching antlers is shown in loose, painted washes of blue, purple, pink, red and orange, with dripping edges. Black linework defines the eyes, nose and parts of the face, and small coloured dots and splashes float above the antlers. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder area against plain skin and a dark top.

Upper arm Deer Stag Antler Dot Splatter

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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 damp gets into everything in Porthkerris, and by March the paper curls before you've finished a wash. You work at the back of Ada's chandlery with the shutters half down, a jam jar of rinse water going grey at your elbow. The commission is a stag for the lifeboat crew's fundraiser, and Mr Tremayne wants it "proper, like a real one", which you take to mean antlers that look like spray off the breakwater.

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So you let the colour run. Blue first, a cold wash that pools where the neck should be, then violet dropped in while it's still wet so it blooms on its own. You don't fight the drips. Each one runs toward the paper's edge like rain down a window, and you leave them where they land. Ada comes past with a mug of tea, peers over your shoulder and says the animal looks like it's been caught in a squall. You tell her that's the idea.

The dots are the difficult part. They have to float above the antlers as if the stag has just shaken them loose, specks of teal and rose and one fat orange drop you nearly ruin with your sleeve. Mrs Tremayne once told you stags shed their antlers every winter and grow them back, which is why she has never wanted one on a wall. You didn't argue. You painted the antlers anyway, branching red into purple into a cloud of blue.

When the paint has dried, the black lines are the only hard edges left: the eye, the wet nose, the curve of one cheek. Everything else is weather. You tear the spoiled sheets off the board, find the stag underneath them still dripping, and it looks more alive than anything you've made in a year.