Black and grey outline tattoo of a heart formed by a curved claw-like shape and a heart line containing paw prints, on skin.

Heart outline with paw prints and a claw

Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo forms a heart outline. The left half is a curved, claw-like or antler-like shape with pointed tips, and the right half is a smooth heart line enclosing a cluster of paw prints. The work uses dark linework with soft grey shading, and the photo is taken straight on against a warm, blurred skin background.

Heart Paw print Claw

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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

The rain had been coming off the Ouse since dawn, turning the cobbles of Saltergate market to grease, and by eleven Mrs Pryce had sold nothing but a single bootlace. She sat under her tarpaulin counting pennies she had already counted, and watched the fishmonger's boy kneel at the drain with a bent wire, fishing for something silver in the grate.

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The boy was Tomas Idris, twelve years old, and he had wheeled a pair of red deer antlers up from the wood above Hebden that morning, strapped to his bicycle with baler twine. The butcher offered him a shilling and then took the offer back. Nobody else would look at them. "Keep at it, lad," Mrs Pryce said. "Whatever's down there has been waiting longer than you have."

The wire caught just as a dog slid out from under the bread van, soaked to the hocks, and went straight for the water running off the kerb. Its prints came back up the stones in neat wet dots, four to a step, and Tomas followed them with the hook in his fist. The trail ended beside a crate of windfall apples, where the dog sat down and looked at him as though he were late.

Mrs Pryce bought the hook for a penny. By four o'clock the boy had hung the antlers from its brass eye above her stall, and the market had emptied into the rain. When the lamps came on, she looked out at the stones and saw that the prints had filled with water, and beside them, where the hook had lain, was the faint outline of a heart.