Black and grey tattoo of a human footprint and a paw print on the inner wrist, with a dog's paw resting on the palm in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Footprint and paw print on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a hand held palm up, with a dog's white paw resting on it against a weathered wooden deck. A small tattoo on the inner wrist depicts a solid, silhouette-style human footprint alongside a smaller paw print. The ink appears dark and even, with no visible shading, and the composition places the tattoo in the lower centre beneath the paw.

Forearm Footprint Paw print Dog Hand

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down, sit, and mind the goat, she has opinions. Now you want the story of Tobias Rennick and the yellow dog, and you'll have it straight, not the version the cook tells at the pump. Rennick carried the mail out along the Cold Wells road for thirty-one years, and that road never cared whether he was tired, or his boots were split, or the sun had cooked his good sense.

Keep reading

The dog turned up in a dust storm the spring the bridge washed out, a pale thing with one ear folded and no collar. Rennick fed her biscuits from his shirt pocket, and she walked the road beside him ever after, never once ahead, never once behind. Out where the sand swallows everything, a footprint goes soft by morning. But every evening, when he stopped at the tin shed to write up his ledger, there was her paw set down right beside his boot, pressed deep, as if she'd been waiting to be counted.

Then came the August he went out alone. The dog sat at the shed door three days with her nose to the gap under the boards. Folk said she'd lost her wits. Mae, his wife, who never trusted a road she couldn't see the end of, went out at dawn with a flask and found his trail running west. The wind had already filled his prints with sand, but beside them ran a second line, every paw set neatly inside a boot mark, as though she'd been walking in his footsteps to keep them open.

Mae followed that line until the afternoon, and at the bottom of a dry wash she found him sitting in the shade with a cracked lamp and a sealed bag of letters. So you see, when the road goes blind, you don't trust your own feet. Put your hand down, and let something that knows the way set its paw in your palm.