Black and grey realism tattoo of a black dog's head tilted upwards, shown on the upper arm in two side-by-side photographs.

Black dog portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large portrait of a black dog's head, tilted upwards, with a glossy black coat, a visible nose and a soft, catchlight-lit eye. The work uses smooth gradual shading and fine highlights to build fur texture and form, against a lightly clouded skin background. Two photographs are shown side by side, one sharper and one at a different angle, both in black and grey ink.

Realism Upper arm Dog Animal Portrait Eye Nose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog came to Ashcombe Halt in the week the signal box burned down, and nobody at the station could say whose he was. He was black as a coal scuttle, with a wet nose and a way of carrying his head tipped up, as though the sky had promised him something and was late with it. Mr Pruett at the ticket window gave him crusts from his tin and said he would be gone by Lady Day. He was not gone by Lady Day.

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Every evening he took the end of the platform, where the lamp caught the rain on his coat and turned it to glass. He watched the 4.10 come round the cutting from Carrow Bridge, watched each carriage door swing open, watched the faces step down and pass him into the dark. When none of them was the face he wanted, he lowered his head by a finger's width and waited for the next train. Passengers began to bring him biscuits. A stationmaster's daughter named him Tobias, and when he never answered to it, the porters simply called him the Watcher.

Ivy Teague, who kept the tea urn in the waiting room, said the dog was waiting for her husband, who had gone to France and never stepped off a train since. Pruett said that was nonsense, and Ivy said it was no more nonsense than anything else on the timetable. They argued it over the urn for three winters. In the fourth, the 4.10 came in early through a sleet so thick the platform lamps were haloes, and the doors opened on nobody at all. The dog did not move. He tipped his head up at the clock above the gate.

Ivy set down her cup and walked out to him in her slippers. "Come on, love," she said, and for the first time he turned his whole body towards her and left the empty track behind. He trotted ahead to the waiting room door and sat there, looking back at her, until she came in out of the cold and the lamp was lit.