Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paw print with dog head silhouette

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black paw print with four toe pads and a larger main pad occupies most of the frame. A dog head in profile, with pointed ears, is left as a white negative shape inside the main pad. The design uses flat solid black with no shading or fine detail, and the composition is centred on a white background.

Paw print Dog Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Saltergate market since before the bells, and the cobbles shone like wet slate under the awnings. Mab Corrie sold eggs and boot polish from the corner pitch, and every morning a grey dog with ears like folded letters came up the hill to sit in the dry lee of her trestle. Her name was Sorrel, and she had never once been late.

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On the Thursday she was late. Mab waited with the eggs packed in straw until the church clock had struck ten twice over, then shut the stall and walked the lanes with a lantern. A tinker's boy said he had seen a dog go down past the tannery toward the weir, and the lane there ran thick with brown water, the way it did after three days of rain.

At the weir Sorrel stood on the lip of the stone, forelegs braced, barking at the spray. Below her, caught in the reeds, a boy of about seven was holding a broken branch and crying without any sound left in him. Mab went down the slimy steps with her skirt bunched in one fist, and the dog came after her, and between them they got the child up onto the bank before the water took the branch.

The boy's mother gave Mab a loaf and a shilling and called her a saint, which Mab said was nonsense. The rain stopped that night. In the morning there was a print pressed into the wet step outside her pitch, one big pad and four toes, and Sorrel lay beside it with her chin on her paws, looking pleased with herself. Nobody swept it away. The traders stepped round it all week, the way you step round a thing you have decided to keep.