Black ink tattoo of a dachshund silhouette inside an ornate scrolled crest with floral details, on the top of an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dachshund silhouette in an ornate crest

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black dachshund silhouette sits centrally inside a shield-shaped crest decorated with scrollwork and floral ornament. The linework is fine and detailed around the border, while the dog is filled in solid black for contrast. The tattoo is shown in black ink only, photographed on a light-skinned ankle against a soft grey blanket.

Blackwork Ankle Dog Crest Shield Scrollwork Floral ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herald was summoned to Hollin Wood because the Duke's hound had refused, for three days, to leave the granary roof. Mistress Ottilie Vane waited at the foot of the ladder with a measuring cord and a cold sausage, and between them they coaxed the animal down by noon. Sir Brannoch Teale, who had sent for a herald rather than a huntsman, wanted the creature entered properly in the Rolls. A beast that long, he said, could not be left without arms.

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Ottilie objected that the hound had no lineage worth the parchment. The herald, a narrow man named Dunstan Crake, measured the animal twice and found it would fit no shield he owned. So he drew a shield anyway, cramped and curved, and filled its border with scrollwork and the wild rose that grew over the granary door. Ottilie wanted nothing but the rose. Sir Brannoch wanted thistles. They settled on both, which pleased nobody except the hound, who had found the warm slope beside the ink pot and was asleep on it.

Crake painted the dog solid, sable, the colour of a night with no moon, since fine lines would only blur on a creature that wagged so much. When the ink dried, the crest looked grander than anything hanging in the Duke's hall, and the hound lay stretched across the lower curve of it like a bar of soot, plainly satisfied with its own portrait.

In the Rolls, beneath the device, Crake wrote the blazon as the rules required: Sable, a hound couchant, long in the body and short in the leg. Then, in smaller letters he hoped nobody would read, he added: Argent, a rose, for the granary, which the hound has never once left alone.