Colour traditional tattoo of a sugar skull hound with flowers and a paw print, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull hound with paw print on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A hound's head is styled as a Day of the Dead sugar skull, with a flower over one eye, painted cheek motifs and a pale grey skull-like face. Below it sits a black paw print with a small heart in its centre, and the hound's long ears and tongue are filled with red, orange and green. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills dominate, with soft grey shading on the head against bare skin.

Traditional Calf Dog Sugar skull Paw print Heart Flower Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first of November was the night the Tollmouth fishermen swept the quay and hung paper marigolds from the bollards, because Mr Ashby said the dead came home by sea and needed a bright road to find the steps. Nobody believed him except old Bramble, who had belonged to my grandfather and was grey around the muzzle and deaf in one ear. She sat by the boat sheds every evening that autumn, waiting for a man who had gone out in the Wren and never come back.

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I was nine and under orders to keep her in, but she slipped the gate on the Thursday and I found her at the end of the sea wall, nose lifted into the wind, ears spread like wet sails. Her tongue hung out the way it did when she was pleased with herself. I sat beside her on the cold stone and we watched the trawler lights come in from the Dogger, one by one, none of them the Wren.

When Mr Ashby came down with his bucket of cement to mend the top step, he found two sets of prints in the wet grey and laughed until he coughed. He pressed a paw into the surface for Bramble, then a second one, and then, without asking me, a small heart in the middle of the pad, drawn with the blunt end of a bent nail. 'Something to keep her by,' he said, and Bramble sneezed at the mess.

The tide came up that night and took the marigolds, but not the print. Fifty years on the heart is worn to a dimple under gulls' feet, and every first of November I walk down to the wall, pull my collar up against the wind, and wait for the lights to come in.