Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bull terrier head within a geometric mandala frame on the lower leg.

Bull terrier head in a mandala on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bull terrier's head in profile sits at the centre of the design, with pointed ears and dotted stippling along the face. It is framed by a layered mandala of leaf-like petals and geometric outlines, with more dotwork shading in the petals. The tattoo is in black ink and greys, shown in a close photo of the lower leg with a partly visible design at the top and right edges.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Dog Mandala Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you lot, and mind the guy ropes. You want the tale of Mr Pilcher's dog, or you want to stand about in the mud eating toffee apples? Right then. Pilcher ran the Lantern Fair from Hull to Hereford, forty years of cocoa-smelling tents and a carousel with one horse missing its ears. The dog came with the dodgems, a black-and-white bull terrier called Gorse, with a head like a clothes iron and ears that stood up sharp as a pair of rooks' beaks.

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Gorse did no tricks. He sat on the ticket box and watched the crowd the way a bishop watches a choir. Every night he counted the lamps, and every night he stopped at the one above the candyfloss stall that flickered and spat. Dora Venn, the widow who ran the stall, said it was the only honest thing on the whole site. When the fair pulled up at Bramcote in October, that lamp went out for good, and Gorse would not leave it alone.

Pilcher took the takings and a spare bulb and went looking. The field was black. Dew lay across the grass like spilled salt, every drop catching the one lantern still burning, and Gorse trotted in a slow circle round the rotted stakes, nose down, ears up, as if he were following a pattern only he could read. Pilcher knelt in the wet. Under the stakes the ground was pressed into rings, one inside the other, like the petals of some flower that had only ever been drawn, and at the centre lay the old lamp, cracked and cold, with the new bulb waiting beside it.

He screwed the bulb in at dawn and never told anybody how it got there. Dora swears the dog sneezed twice. So when you're next at a fair and a flicker catches your eye, you'll know who keeps the rings of the field in order. Now, who wants a toffee apple?