Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a black dog and a brown dog with red roses and a rope border, on a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dogs and roses on the upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a black dog partly behind a brown dog with floppy ears, both in realistic detail with soft shading on the fur and visible eyes and noses. Two red roses with green leaves sit at the lower right, and a twisted rope frames the top of the design. The palette is bold and saturated, with warm browns, deep blacks, reds and greens against the skin.

Neo-trad Realism Back Dog Rose Rope Portrait

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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

Mind the coil, it's the good hemp and I'll not have it kinked. Aye, that's the old tar's dog you're looking at, the black one with the long face. Her name was Pitch, and she came down the cobbles behind a carter who'd lost his temper and his wages in the same afternoon. She didn't want the carter. She wanted the brown dog sat in the chandler's window, the one with ears like wet felt and a grin that had never once been told no.

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They were trouble from the start. Mrs Ardley kept red roses along her wall, the sort that bleed when you cut them, and the pair of them took to sleeping under the blooms. Every morning the rope-walk lads found petals stuck to their fur like wax seals on a letter. Nobody could say who'd taught them to wait by the gate for the fish boats, but by the second winter they were the first thing the men looked for coming up off the slip.

The turn came in February, when the Sea Ellen went out and didn't make the harbour wall before dark. Pitch wouldn't leave the steps. She stood there with the rope we'd tied to her collar fraying in the wind, and the brown one sat down beside her, and neither of them barked once. At first light the boat limped in under a jib patched with old canvas, and the men said afterwards the dogs were the first thing they'd seen through the spray.

Mrs Ardley's roses are gone now, dug out for a car park. But if you want the rope, it's still on the nail behind my door, coiled the way I was taught, and I'll not have it kinked.