Watercolour-style paw print tattoo in pink, blue and green with black linework and a script name, placed on the ribs.

Paw print with watercolour splashes on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A paw print drawn in loose black linework, with pink, blue and green watercolour-style washes filling and spilling beyond its outline. A name is written in black script beneath the print, with thin green and pink strokes running around it. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso over the ribs, against plain skin.

Ribs Paw print Script Name Watercolour splash Splatter

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

The paint was still tacky on the cabin roof when Toby trotted up the gangplank from the towpath and left four neat prints in the cobalt. Ada swore at him in two languages, then at herself, because she had only painted the boat to please her father, and he had been in the ground a fortnight.

Keep reading

Rain came down the Leeds and Liverpool stretch for three days after that. Ada tried to scrub the prints off with turpentine and gave up. Instead she mixed what was left in the tins, rose madder, Prussian blue and a green she had bought off a tinker at Skipton, and dabbed them wet into the paw marks. She let the colour run past the edges, the way the water spilled over the lock gates when they opened.

Lock-keeper Hebden came down to see what the fuss was about. He studied the roof for a long while, then asked the name of the dog. "Toby," Ada said, and fetched the fine brush and wrote it beneath the mess in black, leaning hard so it would hold. Hebden said it looked like a shop sign. She said it was a shop, and the only thing it sold was the walk back to the boat.

When the paint finally dried, Toby was asleep in the middle of the roof with a smear of pink on one foot, and the green had found its way down the side onto the water, where a moorhen was pecking at it as if it were bread.