Black paw print silhouette with the words labrador retriever in script beneath it, shown as a flat design on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Labrador retriever paw print design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold solid black paw print with four toe pads and a larger main pad, set on a white background. Beneath it a thin black line runs into the handwritten script words labrador retriever. The shapes are filled with flat black ink, with no shading or greys, and the composition is simple and centred.

Paw print Paw Dog Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Bess came up the lamp-cage stairs every shift at the Ashworth drift and nobody ever taught her to. Dogs know where the air is good. She'd sit at the bottom of the cage with her tail going like a windscreen wiper until the banksman pulled the gate, and then she'd be off down the cross-cut ahead of the men, nose low, reading the dust.

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Now you listen, because this is the bit my father never got right in the telling. The winter of the fire, the roof came down on the Number Four heading and nine men were underneath it. The rescue men said there was no way through. Bess went in anyway, through a gap no wider than a tin bath, and came back out with her coat black to the skin and the sleeve of a pit jacket in her teeth. That sleeve belonged to Tom Carrick, who was sixteen and had lied about his age to get the job.

Here's the thing about a Labrador's feet. Those pads are broad and soft. They spread on the coal dust like a hand on wet clay, and everywhere she walked she left prints the rescue men could follow in the black, one after another, pointing the way to the air pocket. Ninety-one hours. They got six of the nine out, and Tom was the fourth.

So when the company wanted a monument at the pithead, they asked what we'd put on it. The vicar wanted a cross. The widows wanted names. I said put her feet in the stone, the way she left them, and under them her name, Labrador Retriever, because the papers had her down as that and nobody ever thought to ask her. Let the young ones follow where they lead. Mind your step on the way out, love, there's coal in the cracks yet.