Black and white photo of a small solid paw print tattoo on the neck, just below and behind an ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small paw print tattoo behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black paw print sits on the skin of the neck, behind and below an ear. The shapes are simple and filled in, with a main pad and four toe pads, and the ink appears crisp against the skin. The photograph is black and white, with a soft blurred background of hair in the foreground and background.

Neck Paw print Paw Animal print

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

You are the one who always reaches the pit gate first, before the hooter has finished its long grey note, your thin body pressed against the railings and your tail going like a wiper in the drizzle. Nobody taught you the shift times. You learned them by smell, the coal dust rolling up the lane an hour before the men do.

Keep reading

Mrs Hollis at number nine says you are no good for rabbits and worse for the bins, but she slips you the heel of her bread every Thursday all the same. Your pads are cracked from the slag heaps and the frost on the cinder track, and each morning you walk the lane leaving small prints in the skin of ice on the puddles, four toes and a round pad pressed deep, the only tidy things on that whole grey road.

The night the cage jammed at number two shaft, you did not bark. You went down to the rescue hut and stood there, wet to the belly, until Dai Pritchard came up out of the dark with his lamp dimmed and his face the colour of ash. He knelt, put his hand on your head, and said your name the way you had heard his wife say it on Sundays.

Then you walked him home. You always know the way. When the lamp finally went out on his step, you pressed one muddy paw flat against the door and left a mark that stayed there until the rain came, the same shape as the ones you had been leaving on the lane all winter, only this time you had chosen where it would be seen.