Paw print tattoos across the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot with five small paw print tattoos in grey ink, arranged in a diagonal line across the top of the foot near the toes. The prints are simple solid shapes with no visible shading or fine detail. The toenails are painted purple, and a dark pond with stones and green plants sits in the background.

Other Paw print Foot Toenails

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the reeds, my duck, and don't stand where the mud's soft, because the mill pond keeps what it's given. Ask anyone in Hollin Dyke and they'll tell you about Moss, the grey lurcher who belonged to nobody. She came up the water road the winter the mill wheel froze, with ice knocking at the stones and her coat full of burrs.

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Old Tamsin Reeve kept the eel traps then. She fed the dog on bread crusts and eel heads, and the dog followed her to the pond each dawn, setting her feet down in the black mud one after another, as if she were writing a letter nobody else could read. Tamsin said the prints ran only in a line, five marks going out across the bank and never coming back the same way.

The spring the lock gates failed, the village flooded to the second step. Tamsin went out in the punt with a lantern and did not come home by dark. The men waded the lanes calling her name. It was Moss who found her, sitting on a sunken stile with the water lapping her boots, and Moss walked ahead of the men through the shallows, stopping at every fork to press her paws into the silt so they could see which way the water ran.

They say the grey marks lasted in the mud until midsummer. Tamsin never trod the pond path again without that dog ahead of her, and when she was buried by the mill, the stonemason cut five small prints beside her name. Nobody in Hollin Dyke ever asked where the dog went after. Some still leave bread on the bank for the trail, just in case the water comes up again.