Traditional colour tattoo of a dog wearing round glasses with its tongue out, framed by red and yellow flowers and a ribbon banner, on a calf.

Dog in glasses with flowers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style dog wearing round glasses with its tongue out sits at the centre of the design, with a flower wreath above and a larger flower cluster below. A red ribbon banner with black script runs down the right side, and the design is outlined in bold black linework. Flat fills of red, yellow, green, teal and pale grey make up the colour, with the composition following the curve of the leg.

Traditional Calf Dog Glasses Flower Banner Script Tongue Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Scarrow believed a dog could read, which suited me fine. I kept my spectacles, round and black-rimmed, in the bread bin where Mrs Tulloch never looked, and every Thursday I went down to the harbour to study the ferry timetable pinned outside the shop while the gulls argued over chip papers.

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The notice had been rained on, and the ink had run into a blue smudge. Half the village crowded round it, grumbling. The men said the boat left at six. Old Dougie swore it was sixty and that he'd put a fiver on it. I pushed my nose up to the paper and squinted through the glass. Beside the word there was a small anchor, and beside the anchor a wavy line, which everyone knows means fog.

I barked three times. In Scarrow that means the boat is not coming today, and the crowd turned on me as if I'd kicked the cat. Dougie called me a fraud and a show-off. Mrs Tulloch wanted her spectacles back. Then the fog rolled in, grey as porridge, across the bay, and at six o'clock a horn sounded from somewhere out there, and nothing came in.

The ferry never came that day. Callum rang from the mainland at half past eight to say they'd sat in Kirkwall waiting for the fog to lift. Dougie bought me a sausage roll without a word. I lay on the quay with my tongue out and my glasses back in the bread bin, thinking that a village will forgive a dog nearly anything, provided the dog is right.