Realism tattoo of an Australian Shepherd's head in brown, tan and grey tones with one blue eye, sitting on the upper back below the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Australian Shepherd portrait on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of an Australian Shepherd dog's head, with its mouth open and tongue visible, shown in fine shading across the fur. The dog's coat uses brown, tan, grey and white ink, and one eye is pale blue while the other is amber. The design fills the upper back, with soft shading fading into the surrounding skin.

Realism Back Dog Pet portrait Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the bakers in Lantern Lane lit their ovens, there was a dog named Merrin who slept under the flour sacks. She was a shepherd's get, merle-coated like a winter field after frost, and she had been given to the baker's widow when the flock was sold off. Nobody in the lane could say why one of her eyes was pale as skimmed milk and the other burned amber, only that the pale one saw the dark clearly and the amber one saw the bread.

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The baker, Tobias Vell, was a man who counted his loaves twice and trusted neither count. Every morning at half past three he would stumble down the stairs with a candle, and every morning Merrin would already be standing at the back door, nose to the crack, her tail moving slowly, as if she had heard something the rest of the street had not. He laughed at her for it until the winter the flour went missing a little at a time, and he set a trap of his own and sat up with a poker across his knees.

He did not sleep. At three the back gate rattled. A hooded figure slipped in, and Merrin rose without a sound and stood between the man and the sacks, mouth open, tongue lolling, as if she were only panting. The figure laughed and reached for her collar. She let him come close enough. Then she turned her amber eye on the lamp and her pale eye on the dark corner, and the dark corner answered with a boy's whimper.

The boy was the widow's grandson, hungry and too proud to ask. Tobias set a loaf on the step that morning, still warm, and Merrin lay down beside it with her chin on her paws, the way a shepherd lies when the work is done.