Blue paw print inside a black brush-stroke circle with a black crescent swoosh beneath it, tattooed on an upper arm.

Paw print in brush-stroke circle on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A blue paw print with five toe pads sits inside a loose, hand-painted black circle, with a bold black crescent stroke curving beneath it. The black areas use dense, textured brush-like shading with ragged edges, while the paw is solid blue with a soft highlight. The design is centred on the upper arm against a plain pink top.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric would not let me touch the big brush until Lent was over, so I spent that winter grinding ink on the cloister step and watching him draw circles. He said a circle had to be made in one breath or it was only a bruise on the paper. Most mornings his circles came out lopsided and he tore them up, grumbling about the cold in his wrists.

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The blue came from a dog. Not any dog's dog: a grey bitch with one torn ear who came up the lane from the mill every frost and sat at the refectory door until the cook gave her the rinds. One January she walked straight across the wet flags of the yard, through the bucket where we rinsed the woad pots, and left a trail of blue paws all the way to the chapel steps. Brother Osric knelt with a rag and scrubbed at them, then gave up, sat back on his heels and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. He said God had signed the courtyard for him.

The night before the Feast of the Purification I found him on the step with the lamp out, drawing by moonlight. He had dipped a finger in the woad and made a paw in the middle of a black ring, the ring pressed on so hard the bristles had split. Beneath it he had dragged a long dark crescent, like a moon lying under a sleeping animal. "The circle is what you hold," he said, "and the curve is what it carries." I asked him what it carried. He only tapped the wet blue with one finger, and the moon hung low over the mill roof like a thumbprint on the glass.

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