Red brush-stroke tattoo design on a white background showing a kanji-like character, a paw print and the letter U.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red brush paw print with letters

Colour · Flash

The design shows three separate elements in a row: a brush-drawn character resembling a kanji or cross-like mark, a solid red paw print with four toe pads and a larger main pad, and a brush-drawn letter U. The strokes are bold and slightly ragged, with no shading, and the whole piece is in a single flat red ink on a plain white background.

Paw print Paw Letter Character Brush stroke

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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

The seal on the letter is the first thing the Duchess of Vell will ask about, so you learn to look at it before you look at the ink. Red wax, pressed by something with no thumbs: four toe pads and a heel, the mark of Quill, the grey tom who has slept on the royal archive since before the old king died. Beside the paw someone has scratched a stroke like a crossed-out tower, and a loop that might be a letter U. You have carried three hundred of these seals across the Marrowmere causeway, and nobody has ever told you what they mean.

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The causeway at dusk is no place for questions. Ferrymen wait with their oars shipped, and the reeds hiss with the cold that rises off the water. Halfway across, the wind takes your hood and your lantern gutters, and you hear a sound behind you that is not wind: a patient, damp padding, keeping exactly your pace. You do not turn round. Quill has been sent along to guard the post, the way he is sent with everything the palace does not trust.

At the far bank a miller's daughter is waiting, not for you but for the letter. She breaks the wax with her thumb, reads it once, and laughs until she has to sit on the step. The message, she tells you, is a joke only the two of them understand. The tower is the watchtower where they first met, the paw is his, and the U stands for "you", a word the old king banned from official ink. Quill sneezes into the reeds. You realise you have been delivering love letters for three years and calling them state business.