Colour cartoon tattoo of a pink dog with brown ears and the words The things I do for love, in black lettering, on a lower leg.

Cartoon dog with lettering on a lower leg

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A pink cartoon dog with brown ears, black outlines and wide eyes leaps in the centre of the design, with the words The things I do for love in black handwritten lettering above and below it. The linework is clean and bold, with flat colour fills and no visible shading. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the leg against a patterned green and cream background.

Calf Dog Cartoon character Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nan, the big top at Pardoe's came down in Carlisle on Tuesday, half of it in the mud before the last matinee. Mr Pardoe says we'll be back on the road by Easter, but he said the same about the elephants, and the elephants went to a farm in Cumbria last spring and I'm told they're happier for it.

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The only act still drawing a crowd is Bunty, the pink mongrel who came to us in a feed sack behind the Doncaster lorry. She's all ears and nerves. Every night she climbs the ladder to the high platform, takes one look down at the four hundred empty seats, and trembles so hard her ears slap against her cheeks. Then she jumps anyway, legs going like a windmill, and the few families left clap as if the Queen has arrived. I sew her spangled collar on Thursdays and she always tries to bite the needle.

Last night Mr Pardoe sold her collar to Bennett the scrap man to pay for the hay. He didn't tell me until the interval, and by then Bunty had already gone up the ladder without it, looking back over her shoulder as if she knew. I found her afterwards behind the costume trunks, shaking, with a bent pin in her mouth. So I've stitched her a new collar out of my good pink silk, and I've told Pardoe she's been moved to the lion's old cage for her nerves. He didn't ask which lion.

She's asleep on my feet as I write this, twitching now and then, probably dreaming she's still up in the air. Write soon and tell me how the Hull weather is. I'll post this from Lancaster if the post van still runs.

Your loving sister, Ivy