Colour neo-traditional tattoo on an upper arm showing a dog in a blue hooded robe with clasped hands, framed by yellow and red roses and a winged skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dog in hooded robe with roses and skull

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A dog's head sits on a figure in a blue star-patterned hooded robe, with clasped hands in front of an orange radiant halo. Yellow and red roses flank the figure, and a purple winged skull with a dagger sits below. Bold outlines and saturated colour fill the composition, which is shown in a close photo of the upper arm.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Dog Praying hands Halo Rose Skull Wing Dagger Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog was already sitting on the bollard when we brought the Mary Ellen in with her nets in ribbons, as if someone had booked him for the tide. Nobody on the quay knew him. Bessie Crane said he had come off the Scarborough boat in a fish crate, but Bessie says most things after her second gin, so we let it go and gave him the end of a herring.

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He had a cloak by then, blue as a mackerel's back and sewn all over with little gold stars, which everyone agreed had once hung in the chapel of St Elowen before the damp got into the wall. The chapel's figure had gone to firewood the winter before. The dog stood in the empty niche with his paws folded under his chin, and the old women began leaving roses on the step. Red ones from the vicarage, yellow ones from somebody's back garden, always fresh, though nobody admitted to cutting them.

In February the Ellen went out on the ebb and did not come back on the flood. We stood on the wall until our hands went numb. Near midnight the dog walked down the slipway into water that should have taken a grown man, and sat there with the cloak floating round him like a lamp. At first light the Ellen came round the headland on one engine with a torn sail, and her skipper swore a blue light had stood on the bow the whole way home.

The roses are still on the step. Nobody has ever found the dog's body, and nobody has ever tried very hard. I take my cap off when I pass the niche now, and I fold my hands the way he does, which Bessie says is the only prayer I have ever meant.