Close-up photo of a tattoo of black outlined paw prints with grey fill and a small pink heart on pale skin, placement not clear.

Paw prints and a pink heart

Other · Mixed · Photo

Three rows of paw print outlines run down the skin, with a pink heart between two groups of prints. The paw prints are drawn with black outlines and grey fill, and the heart has a black outline with pink shading. Colour is limited to black, grey and a single pink, set against a plain, light background.

Other Paw print Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has been out since before dawn, and the stone stairs of the Skerrow light are wet with it. You count the steps the way your father taught you, one hand on the cold rail, and by the ninetieth you find the first print. It is small and grey, pressed into the salt film on the fourth tread, and above it another, and another, climbing the spiral ahead of you like a message nobody has bothered to sign.

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Mrs Pennock's tabby has been missing since the storm. She is the reason you are up here at six in the morning instead of brewing tea in the cottage with the kettle singing. You follow the prints round the lamp room, past the brass gears and the dead moths, and out onto the gallery where the wind tries to take your cap. The prints stop at the rail. Beyond it, the sea is wrestling with the rocks, and the rocks are wearing the grey foam like fur.

Then you see it: a heart, pink as a winter sunrise, painted in salt and lichen on the iron rail where someone, years ago, must have pressed a hand. Under it, the cat sits neatly on the gallery, tail wrapped round her feet, as though she has been waiting for someone to notice what she has been trying to show you all along.

You pick her up. She does not struggle. Below, the light sweeps the water once, twice, and you think of your father, who never once climbed these stairs without leaving a mark on the rail for her to find. You carry her down slowly, counting the steps again, and this time you are the one leaving prints.