Neo-traditional tattoo of a pug's face in tan and blue-grey with yellow eyes, shown on a forearm.

Pug face on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close, front-facing pug face fills the centre of the frame, with a dark diamond mark on the forehead and small whisker lines on each side. The bold black outline is combined with smooth tan and blue-grey shading that gives the fur and folds of the face depth. Yellow irises with dark pupils stand out against the muted palette, and the plain skin around the design keeps the subject in clear focus.

Neo-trad Forearm Pug Dog Face Whiskers Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that plank's been loose since the winter the Cut froze over, and you'll not want to go in after your hat. Now then. My grandfather ran the coal boat Dorothea Mae between Braunston and the Brentford basin, and he had a pug called Tuppence who rode the foredeck like a figurehead, brown as toffee and sulking at everything. She had a black mark on her brow like someone had pressed a thumb into wet clay, and she wore that face of hers as though the whole canal had done her a personal injury.

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One February a lock keeper at Hatton cut a nasty notch in the towpath and the Dorothea Mae grounded on the bank with a load of Welsh coal and no way off. My grandfather went to shout for help along the lane, and he left Tuppence on the cabin roof with strict instructions. She did not move. Not for the carter, not for the grey heron, not for the lock keeper's boy with his bag of biscuits. She sat in the frost with her great soft eyes fixed on the water and her whiskers bristling at the wind, and when they got back at dusk she was still there, looking as miserable as a magistrate.

The river had risen a foot in the hour. Had she shifted, the barge would have floated free and drifted through two locks in the dark with no one aboard. My grandfather always said she had known it. He said that was why she looked so cross, carrying a secret like that all afternoon with nobody to tell.