Small solid black paw print tattoos grouped on the ankle of a person wearing rolled-up jeans and a black shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small paw prints on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Three small solid black paw prints sit together on the side of an ankle, one slightly lower than the other two. The prints are simple silhouettes with no shading, and the ink is crisp against the skin. The ankle is shown against a black court shoe and a wooden deck, with rolled denim above.

Ankle Paw print Paw Animal

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

The prints came every morning after the thaw, pressed into the mud of the cloister walk as neatly as a scribe's dots. Three of them, the two outer pads wide and the centre one a little lower, as if the animal had stopped to look back. Brother Tomas, who kept the cellar and had opinions about everything that walked on the abbey's ground, swore it was a fox. Brother Wilfrid swore it was a hound with a hurt foot. Neither of them had seen it.

Keep reading

Abbot Ealdred ordered the gate barred at compline and a bowl of milk set out at dawn, which Tomas thought a waste of good barley. Brother Anselm, who had lain in the infirmary since Candlemas with a cough that would not loosen, asked for the shutter to be left open a crack. He said something sat on the sill at night, and it had a warm, patient way of breathing.

Nobody saw the creature come or go. But on the morning Anselm died, the prints were there in the frost of the infirmary path, going down towards the water meadows, one set after another, the centre pad always a step behind. They followed the river as far as the old ford and stopped at the flat stone where the monks had buried their dogs for three hundred years. Beyond it there was no mark at all, only the grey water and a single crow on the far bank.

Tomas filled the bowl that dawn regardless. He said it was for the poor, and nobody argued, because the milk was gone by noon and nobody could say who had taken it. In chapter that winter the abbot read the names of the dead, and when he came to Anselm he paused, and the brothers heard him add quietly that the shutter had been left open for someone. Then he went on to the next name.