Colourful sketch-style tattoo of a Boston terrier's head in pink, lilac and pale blue with black outlines, on a person's calf.

Pink and blue dog portrait on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of a dog's head and upper body, shown facing forward with large upright ears and round dark eyes. The linework is loose and sketchy in black, and the fills are soft washes of pink, purple and pale blue that fade out at the edges, giving a watercolour-like finish. The tattoo sits on a bare lower leg against a tiled floor.

Calf Dog Pet portrait

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

Dear Gwen, The painter came up Tallow Row on Tuesday with a tin box of brushes and a cough he kept apologising for. He asked Mrs Pryce at the top shop whose dog it was that sat at the pit gate every morning, the square-headed terrier with ears like folded envelopes. She told him it had been Dai Hoskins's, and that Dai had gone under in March, but the dog had never got the message and still walked the men to the cage each shift.

Keep reading

He wanted to paint it. A shilling a sitting, he said, and he would do the whole head, not just the ribbon on the collar. So on Wednesday the dog sat on an upturned coal skip while the painter mixed his colours on a biscuit tin lid. He used the blue from the chapel's old distemper, a pink he got by boiling down the red of the Whit Friday rosettes, and a purple that he said came from bruised blackberries. I thought it looked like nothing at all until he began, and then the face came up out of the paper like it had been waiting underneath.

He was done by the six o'clock whistle. He said the washes would fade in the damp and only the black lines would keep, but I do not think Dai's dog minds. This morning I saw it standing right under the painted sheet he pinned to the wash-house wall, the pink and blue run down in streaks where the rain got in, and the dog looked up at its own face and then went off to the gate.

Write soon, and tell Mam the kettle is mended.

Nell