Black linework tattoo design of a paw print with a large heart and two spirals in the pad, drawn on a white background, with no placement shown.

Paw print with hearts and spirals

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black paw print design on a white background, with four toe pads above a large heart-shaped main pad. The inner pad holds a smaller central heart, two small hearts, a row of dots and two spirals. The solid black outlines and open white spaces are crisp and evenly weighted, with no shading.

Paw print Heart Spiral Dot

Find an artist for this

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

You find the prints in the frost behind the bakehouse, five toes each, but the middle pad is heart-shaped and two whorls curl out from under it like fern heads. Nobody in Aldermoor will say whose dog left them. Old Mrs Pell says it is a hound that went into the trees the winter the mill burned, and that it still comes back for whoever leaves crumbs at the edge of the wood.

Keep reading

You don't believe her, but you go anyway with a heel of bread in your coat. The trail runs between the beeches, neat and deliberate, stopping every few yards where the snow has been pressed into a single small heart. At the clearing a flat stone sits in a ring of dots, and the tracks wind round it twice in spirals before they stop.

You sit on the cold stone and break the bread into pieces. Nothing comes at first. Then a dog-shaped quiet settles at your left side, warm through the wool of your sleeve, and you feel its weight lean against your ribs the way a tired animal does when it has decided you are safe. You do not turn your head. You count the breaths between the trees until the light goes amber.

When you walk home there is a fresh print beside your own boot, four toes above a large heart, and the lamps are coming on in the village below the ridge. Mrs Pell is at her gate. She asks if you went to the clearing. You say yes. She nods as though you have paid a debt she forgot was owed, and goes inside without another word.