Black stippled paw print tattoo on the ribs, with a heart-shaped gap of bare skin in one of the toe pads.

Paw print with heart on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A paw print made of black ink, with four toe pads and a larger main pad, sits on the side of the torso. The toe pads are built from dense stippled dots that fade into softer, sparse speckling around the centre. A small heart is left as untouched skin within the top right toe pad, and the shading is mostly black with no colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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Moss has worn a track from the back door to the gate and along the sea wall, and every morning I go out with the bucket and find the same prints in the frost: four toes and the big pad at the heel, pressed so deep the ground looks bruised. You'd laugh at me, rushing out in my slippers to count them. Mam says I'm measuring the dog for a coffin, but I'm not. I'm counting how many mornings he has kept to the path you took.

The gate hangs off one hinge now. Dad propped it with a fence post the week after the Marigold went out, and nobody has had the heart to fix it since. Moss sits on that post every dusk facing the harbour, the way he did when you whistled him in from the nets. Yesterday the postman said the Dunmore boat came in with a crew of four and a crate of mackerel, and Moss didn't even lift his head. He only twitched his ears when the wind dropped.

I found something by the wall this morning. Where the frost had melted in the shape of a paw, the ground underneath had kept its colour, pale and clean, with a small heart left bare in the middle of the dark mud where his right fore had been lifting off. I don't know what it means. Maybe nothing. I put the kettle on and stood with the cup going cold, watching the tide come up over the prints one by one until there was only the gate left.

Come home when you can. He'll know before I do.

Love, Nell

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