Black dotwork tattoo of a sitting dog looking up at a spider hanging on a thread, on the inner forearm of a person wearing dark clothing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork dog and spider on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sitting dog with upright ears gazes upward at a small spider dangling from a thread above it. The dog is built from stippled dots that give soft shading, while the spider and thread use finer, more defined linework. The image is in black ink and greys, and the arm is photographed against a patterned fabric background with part of another tattoo visible at the lower left.

Dotwork Forearm Dog Spider Thread Moth

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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

Every night the old dog sat at the foot of the ward stairs, ears up, waiting for a bell that never rang. Nobody on the night shift had given him a name, so they called him Sentry and fed him crusts from the tea trolley. The porter swore he had seen the dog watching the ceiling, following something the rest of them could not see.

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Above the lift doors a spider had strung her thread from the light fitting down to the handrail. She was small and patient, and she caught the moths that came in from the car park through the gap in the fire doors. The dog never chased her. He looked up at her the way a mother looks at a sleeping child, and she, as far as anyone knew, looked back.

One February night the power failed on the third floor, and the emergency lamps came on one by one, faint and yellow. The nurses went along the corridor with torches, counting beds, and nobody saw the dog climb the stairs. When they found him he was sitting outside the linen room with his head tipped back, staring at a thread that swayed in a draught from a door nobody had opened. Behind that door a drip stand had begun to roll down the slope where the floor had been mopped and left unmarked.

They caught it just before it reached the lift shaft. The porter says the spider was gone by morning, and the thread was gone with her. The dog still sits at the foot of the stairs, ears up, looking at the empty light fitting, waiting for the bell to ring for someone else.