Colour realism tattoo of a smiling dog's face with an open mouth and tongue on a lower leg, with purple and blue fading out below the chin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic dog portrait on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A dog's face and upper chest are rendered in soft, detailed strokes, with a smiling open mouth, pink tongue and dark, shining eyes. The fur is shaded in browns, oranges and cream, with blurred purple and blue strokes fading out at the base of the design. The photo is taken straight on against a blue fabric and a light wooden floor, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Calf Dog Portrait Fur Pet portrait

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the dog. She won't hurt you, she only wants to see your hands. Now. The road you came in on was not always a road. Before the surveyors came with their red poles there was just a track of pale dust between the saltbush and the mesa, and a shepherd called Eamon Tully who walked it every August with three hundred ewes and one collie bitch named Ruby.

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Ruby had a coat like a fox that had been dipped in cream. When the wind came off the flats it lifted her fur into a ruff so wide you could lose a hand in it, and the drovers used to say she was the only thing in the territory that looked cooler in a heatwave. Eamon swore she could smell water through a mile of rock. She could, too, and that was the only reason any of them lived through the dry years.

One night in the third summer of the drought, Eamon sat by a cold fire with his hat over his eyes and did not get up. Ruby would not leave him. She lay across his boots with her tongue out and that daft, delighted grin of hers, and she would not stop until he laughed. He laughed. Then he got up, and they walked on, and the ewes followed the dog the way they always had.

They found the seep at dawn, under a split rock where the dust turned dark. Eamon knelt and drank, and when he looked up Ruby was already sitting at the edge, watching him with her head on one side, as if the job was done and she had only been waiting for the thanks. The road was named after her afterwards, though the surveyors spelled it wrong on the map.