Close photograph of a solid black paw print tattoo with a small heart cut out of one toe pad, in a blackwork style, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black paw print tattoo with a heart

Blackwork · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black paw print with four toe pads and a larger main pad, with a small heart-shaped gap in the upper right toe. The edges are slightly ragged, with fine specks of ink scattered around the design. The image is in black ink only, shown in close view against pale skin with a dark fabric edge at the top left.

Blackwork Paw print Paw Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour sack split at four bells, and by the time Dilys Pring came down the galley steps with the kettle, the lino looked like a field after the first snow. Tansy had been through it. Four toe pads and a fat main pad pressed clean into the white, all of them going the same way, towards the stove and the warm side of the bulkhead. In the upper toe, where the flour had caught on a smear of dripping, the print had left a small heart-shaped gap, as if someone had punched it out with a pastry cutter.

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The ship's rule was no dogs in the galley. Captain Oakes had said so at the sailing, and he had said it again at Hull when the dockers' terrier tried to come aboard with a ham in its mouth. Dilys had kept Tansy out of sight through two ports and a gale off Flamborough, but the dog had a way of finding warmth. She'd been under the range all night, Dilys guessed, nose to the oven door, listening to the pans slide and clatter as the Marigold rolled.

The gale dropped at dawn. Dilys was on her knees with a bucket, meaning to sweep the flour into the scuttle before the second mate came down for his tea, when she saw the prints again. They went out of the door, across the passage, and back again, a slow loop round the galley and the stores and the foot of the companionway, as though the dog had gone looking for the cook in every corner of the ship and come back each time to report.

She left the heart where it was. When Harry Lusk came in, stamping, he stepped round the marks without a word, and Dilys let him think the flour had simply spilt.