Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketchy dog head on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A dog's head in right-facing profile, drawn with loose, overlapping black crosshatched lines that suggest the ears, eye, muzzle and fur. Shading is built from dense hatching around the eye and under the jaw, leaving the skin visible through lighter areas. The design is black and grey and sits centred on the thigh against plain, pale skin.

Blackwork Thigh Dog Animal 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

Ottilie had drawn the dog eleven times before she got the ear right, and by then he had stopped sitting for her. He lay instead on the harbour wall at Marrowby with his back to the town, watching the boats go out past the breakwater as though the sea owed him an explanation. Nobody in the fishing quarter could say whose dog he was. He ate what the gutting tables let fall and slept under the tarred nets, and the children called him Pim because he answered to nothing else.

Keep reading

She worked in the loft above the net-mender's, where the light came through a single salt-clouded window and the pencils went blunt by noon. Her master had told her a line should be sure of itself or not drawn at all, so she learned to draw many lines quickly and let the wrong ones sit beside the right ones. Muzzle, jaw, the soft fold of the cheek. Each stroke crossed the last at a slant, so that the dog came up out of the paper the way a wet dog comes out of the water, all at once and shaking off the rest.

On the last evening of the herring season the boats came in heavy and Pim was gone from the wall. Ottilie found him at the end of the slip, nose to the wind, looking east toward the grey shelf of the Tollen Banks where the Marrowby boats had not returned in three weeks. She sat beside him with the sketchbook open on her knee and drew him once more, quickly, without lifting the pencil far from the page. When she finished she pressed hardest at the eye, so it sat dark and certain in the middle of all that uncertainty, and left the jaw trailing off into loose hatching, as if he had already half turned to go down the slip and out to meet them.