Dog portrait with roses and script lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a dog's head in profile with its mouth open and tongue out. Three roses with shaded petals and leaves sit below the dog, and flowing script lettering reading misunderstood breed curves across the top. The drawing uses soft graphite shading in grey tones on a pale background, with a balanced, centred composition.

Lettering Realism Traditional Dog Rose Script Flourish Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council letter arrived the same week Bruno dug up Mrs Pardoe's begonias for the third time, and I read it standing on my back step with the dog leaning against my shins, tongue hanging out the side of his mouth like a wet dishcloth. Dangerous breed, it said. Owners are reminded of their responsibilities. I folded it into the bin with the potato peelings.

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Bruno had never bitten anyone. He was nine years old, broad as a coal bunker, and his idea of a fearsome act was rolling in the lawn clippings until he smelled of cut grass and mud. But he had a face that frightened people before he had done a thing, all that heavy jaw and those pale, watchful eyes, and I had spent six years explaining him over the fence.

The trouble came on a Sunday in June. The Tanner boys had shinned up the fence to get at my apple tree, and I heard the wood crack before I heard them shout. By the time I reached the back door, Bruno had walked the length of the rose bed and planted himself between the children and my three Peace roses, head low, not barking, just looking at them. The boys stood on the fence rail, white-faced, and neither of them moved until I called him off. He came to me as if he'd been asked to fetch the paper.

Mrs Pardoe had watched the whole thing from her kitchen window. The following week she knocked on my door holding a cutting wrapped in damp newspaper. 'Lavender,' she said, 'for the fence side, if he's going to be out there anyway.' She didn't apologise, and she didn't need to. Bruno sniffed her shoes and sneezed, and she laughed for the first time in the six years I'd known her.