Black ink drawing of a paw print on cream paper, with the pad and toes filled in with swirling, looping and triangular doodle-style patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paw print design in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A paw print with one large pad and five toe shapes, drawn in black ink on a cream background. The pad and toes are filled with dense looping curves, circles, and triangular lines, with a soft shaded edge around the outline. The image is monochrome and centred, with the design filling most of the frame.

Paw print Paw Animal Swirl Triangle Circle Doodle

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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

Tuesday, low water at a quarter past four. The mud below the slipway held prints I have never seen on Carrick Quay, five toes in a fan and one broad pad, and they went from the fish store to the edge of the sea and stopped as if whatever made them had simply decided to swim. Mrs Oddie from the net loft says it was a seal pup pulling itself about. Seals do not leave pads. I took a sheet of Dad's drawing paper and traced the nearest one with a bottle of Indian ink, and while I worked I kept filling the spaces with what the tide had left: the loops of the rope coil, the little triangles of the gulls' feet in the sand, circles where the barrels had rolled.

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Wednesday. The prints came back at the same hour, but this time they were on the steps, climbing. I counted six by the lamp. Ned at the chandlery laughed until he coughed, then went quiet when I showed him my tracing and said his grandfather had drawn the same shape on a ledger in 1931, under a line that read Do not feed. We went down together with a torch and a bucket of herring heads, which I know was foolish, and sat on the bollard until the light came grey over the breakwater.

Nothing came. What we found instead was on the last step: one print pressed sharp and clean into wet stone, pad and toes all in a single curl, as though something had stood there long enough to be sure of its direction and then turned for the open water. I did not feel the need to follow it. I put my pen away, wrote down the time, quarter to six, and the height of the tide, and went home to sleep through the morning.