Small black paw print tattoos sit behind the ear on the neck of a person with short dark hair, seen from the side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paw prints behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Four small solid black paw prints are arranged in a loose cluster behind the ear, on the side of the neck. The shapes are simple silhouettes with no shading, and the rest of the frame is dominated by dark hair and skin. The photograph is taken from behind and to the side, so the face is not visible.

Neck Paw print Animal

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

Tomas Greer kept the lamp at the end of Skerry Quay, and the dog that came down the harbour steps every morning at the turn of the tide was not his. She was a grey lurcher with one ear torn, and she belonged to nobody in Brynmoor, which meant she belonged to everybody who fed her.

Keep reading

The fleet went out on the first of the ebb, eleven boats in a ragged line. The lurcher ran the wall beside them as far as the breakwater, then sat and watched them go. The fishwives said she was waiting for a man who drowned off the Teeth the winter before the new pier was built. The old men said nothing. They had seen her prints on the wet slipway after the boats were gone, four small pads in a loose ring, and none of them wanted to say how a dog's feet came to be on dry stone at noon.

On the day the Marigold did not come back, Tomas walked the wall with his lantern and found the dog already there, nose to the tideline. She led him past the lobster pots and the boarded chandlery to a flat rock where the sea had left a cracked crab shell and a single oilskin glove. She sat and looked at him. Then she barked once, the way a dog calls the rest of the pack home.

The Marigold came in on the evening flood, two men short but with all her sails. Nobody asked how the lurcher knew. Tomas still does not ask. He leaves a scrap of mackerel on the bottom step each dawn, and each morning there are the four small prints pressed into the salt, pointing out to sea.