Collage of four dog tattoos: a black and white bulldog in a mandala, a coloured dog head in a bold neo-traditional style, a cubist dog head, and a small grey pug with a heart above it.

Four dog tattoos in different styles

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows four tattoos of dogs on skin. The top left is a black and white bulldog face inside a detailed mandala, with bold solid black areas and fine dotted linework. The other three are coloured or mixed: a stylised dog head with bright orange and red tones, a cubist dog face in blocks of blue, pink and yellow, and a small grey pug with soft shading and a pink heart above it.

Blackwork Geometric Neo-trad Forearm Upper arm Dog Pug Mandala Heart Geometric Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bulldog had sat in the front window of Haskett's Clock Repair since before anyone on Crown Street could remember, and nobody agreed on who had painted the ring of lace around his head. Mrs Oddie swore it was her late husband's work, done on the back of a gas bill, though he had never drawn anything in his life that wasn't a betting slip. Haskett himself said the dog had come with the shop, the way the damp did.

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The pug arrived in a crate of returned mantel clocks on a wet Tuesday in March. Haskett lifted the lid expecting a movement with a loose spring and found instead a grey puppy with a face like a crumpled letter, sulking at the ticking. He named it Tuesday, because that was the day it had turned up, and because it kept the wrong time with great confidence. By the end of the week it had eaten a pendulum and slept inside a grandfather clock with the door shut.

On Thursday the power failed along the whole valley. The shop went dark except for the lamp Haskett kept by the bench, and in its light the other dogs seemed to gather. The fox-coloured one from the allotments trotted in through the back door, the blue and pink one that lived under the bus shelter leaned against the counter, and all of them stared at the bulldog's dotted circle as if it were a door they might walk through. Haskett said afterwards that the lace had looked like a map of somewhere calmer.

When the current came back, the clocks started again one at a time, out of step with each other. Tuesday sneezed from inside the grandfather clock. Haskett wrote the date on a repair ticket, looked at it for a long moment, and set the hands an hour behind the world, because the dogs did not keep time and he had decided it was not his place to argue with them.