Watercolour-style paw print tattoo in blue, green, yellow, orange, red and purple on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow paw print on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A paw print made of soft, blended toe pads and a larger main pad, with small splatter dots trailing beside it. The shapes have feathered, soft edges with no hard black outlines, so the design reads as painted rather than linework. Colours run from blue and green at the top left through yellow and orange to red and purple at the base, set against pale skin.

Forearm Paw print Paw Rainbow Splatter

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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

Ruth Calloway kept her paints in a tin box under the stern bench, and the cat on the boat, a grey tom called Tallow, had learned to walk through anything wet. The autumn the Wey flooded, the lock gates stuck open for nine days and the boat sat tied to the bank with nowhere to go. Ruth was painting the cabin roof a green that would not dry.

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On the tenth morning the sun came low over the water and a rainbow stood across the towpath. Tallow climbed out of the cabin, stepped straight into the spilt tins and walked the length of the roof, leaving prints the colour of the sky. Blue first, then green, then the warm colours, and last a heavy red and purple where he sat down to wash one foot and shook it dry.

A bargeman passing on the next boat leaned over and said she would have to paint over it. Ruth said no. The cat had made the mark, and it was his to keep. She sat on the bank with the brush across her knees and watched the prints dry in the sun, the little spatters beside them drying into the wood like seed.

When the rain came in November she repainted the roof grey, as she had always meant to. The paw prints showed through anyway, faint at first and then bright again, and every spring after, when the water rose, the lock-keeper's children climbed aboard to find them and said the rainbow had come down to see the cat.