Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dog head silhouette on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a dog's head in profile faces left, with the skin showing through as white for the muzzle and eye. Small black wedge shapes sit beneath it, and the linework is bold with no shading. The tattoo is shown in black ink only, photographed on a bare ankle and heel against a white cloth.

Blackwork Ankle Dog Animal Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, all of you, the barrier goes up when it goes up. Now, the dog. Her name was Pilar, and she had a white blaze across her face as if someone had dragged a thumb through wet ink. She belonged to Oskar Venn, a customs clerk who had never once in twenty years looked a dog in the eye. She lay in the back of his hut all day with her ears up like two folded sails, watching the river.

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The trouble came on a wet Tuesday when a lorry of pear brandy rolled up without its papers. Venn searched the cab, the axles, the spare wheel, and then he stopped, because Pilar had walked to the edge of the bench and set her three small black feet down in a neat row, as if she had been asked to stamp something. Behind her, on the whitewashed wall, lay her shadow. It was a dog's head turned toward the lorry, perfectly black, with a pale patch where the muzzle should have been. Nobody could say where the rest of her had gone.

Venn wrote in his ledger that a shadow is not a passenger and so cannot be detained. He stamped the lorry through, and the driver, grateful, tossed the dog a sausage that she did not eat. From that night on, the brandy lorries crossed with a small black shape riding the tailboard, unseen by the men at the barrier, and the river kept its own count of who went over.

So when you reach the front of the queue, don't mention shadows to the officer. Show your papers, and if a dog looks at you with one white eye, let her through.