Colour realism tattoo of a white dog in a green jacket and red tie, framed in an ornate gold border, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dog portrait in gilt frame on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A white, fluffy dog with a black nose and dark eyes is shown from the chest up, wearing a teal jacket with a red tie and a small pin on the lapel. The portrait sits inside an elaborate gold frame with scrollwork and a fleur-de-lis crest at the top, in the style of a Victorian painting. The soft shading and blended colours give the fur and fabric a painted look, and the tattoo is centred on the skin with a blurred background.

Realism Calf Dog Portrait Jacket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The painter came up the valley on the Tuesday coach with his easel roped to the roof, and by the Thursday the whole of Hollin Row knew he had been hired to paint Alderman Pryce's dog. Nobody had asked the dog. It was a white poodle called Captain, clipped to look like a lord's hedge, and Pryce had it dressed for the sitting in his bottle-green velvet jacket, a red silk necktie, and the brass pin he wore for the Mechanics' Institute.

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The painter worked three weeks in the back parlour with the blinds half down. Captain sat on a cushion and yawned through most of it. The women at the wash-house said the picture would never be finished, because no man could make a poodle look like he had ever been told no. But when the gilt frame came up on the cart from Sheffield, with its curled leaves and a fleur-de-lis at the crown, even the women went quiet. The dog looked out of it grave and reasonable, like a magistrate weighing a bad case.

That winter the Hollin pit took water. Eleven men were kept under for two nights, and the rescue men argued at the pithead until the wives came up with lamps of their own. Pryce had the portrait carried down to the colliery office and hung above the pay table, where the clerk counted out wages on Fridays. Amos Doyle swore that whenever he tallied a short packet, the poodle's dark eyes seemed to narrow, and by the Saturday the sums were put right.

Pryce died in the spring, owing the men nothing, and the painting stayed on its nail. On payday the clerk still lifts his pen to the frame before he begins, and the little brass pin on the dog's lapel catches the lamplight, as if somebody has just tapped it for attention.