Black stippled paw print tattoo on a forearm near the wrist, with a dog's paw resting in an open hand on grass.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paw print tattoo on forearm beside a dog's paw

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds a dog's paw against a backdrop of grass, and a black paw print tattoo sits on the inner forearm beside the wrist. The tattoo is made of stippled dots and short strokes that give the pad and toe shapes a textured, speckled look. The composition is shot from above, with the tattoo and the paw sharing the frame in soft daylight.

Dotwork Forearm Paw print Paw Hand Dog

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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 dog came up Mill Lane the week the last coal lorry stopped running, a brown lurcher with one ear folded over like a letter nobody had opened. Nobody claimed her. Mr Pell at the chemist's said she belonged to the railway, and Mrs Hobday swore she had come off a farm past Stow, but she slept on our back step all that winter, and by March she was walking me to school.

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I was nine and believed a dog could be trusted with anything, including a secret. The secret was my father's little printing press in the bakehouse, where he set the parish notices in type so small you needed a lens to read them. He had a rubber stamp for the church magazine, cut from a bottle cork, with five pads in a ring. Whenever Tess came through the yard he pressed her left forefoot onto the ink and walked her across a sheet of blotting paper, and the prints came out grey and speckled, the pads dotted where the cork had worn soft.

In June the Hobdays' boy said the keeper had threatened to shoot her for chasing hens. I ran the length of the Market Place with the blotter rolled under my arm, certain that if I showed people her prints they would have to admit she was ours. Nobody stopped to look. Tess came home regardless, her coat dusty, and sat down on the step as if she had never left it.

My father unrolled the blotter that evening, read nothing on it, and pinned it above the press. It is still there in the house, the ink gone the colour of weak tea, and I can still tell you which print is hers, because the middle pad sits a little apart from the others, as if she had paused to see who was calling.