Two small solid black paw print tattoos, each with a heart-shaped gap in the main pad, on the inner wrist.

Two paw prints on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small paw prints sit on the inner wrist, each with four toe pads above a larger main pad. The main pads contain a heart-shaped area of unfilled skin, and the black ink is solid and even with no visible grey shading. The prints are placed on a diagonal, with the raised hand at the top of the frame against a blue background.

Forearm Paw print Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog came over Hollin Bridge at the change of shift, when the lamp above the barrier was the only light for three miles of wet road. Sergeant Aled Moss had her papers in his hand before he noticed she carried no lead and wore no collar, only a grey lurcher's coat gone thin at the ribs. Behind her the river ran high and loud under the iron span.

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He wrote nothing in the book for the animal, which was against the rules, and she waited on the white line as patiently as any traveller. When he lifted the barrier she trotted through and stopped on the far side to lift each forepaw and press it into the mud. Two prints, neat as stamps, each with a small heart left unmarked at the centre of the pad. Then she was gone up the hill towards the village where his mother had kept a sheepdog for fourteen years.

Moss told nobody, but the following week a lorry driver swore he had seen a grey dog at the bridge, and a woman in the chemist's said the same. Every wet morning after that there were two paw prints on the customs side, always facing the town. Moss swept them away with the grit at first, then stopped, because sweeping felt like turning someone back at the gate.

In March he took the early shift himself, and when the lurcher came over he lifted the barrier without a word and walked with her to the first house on the hill. The door was already open. A small boy in a dressing gown knelt in the hall and said her name the way children say things they have been waiting all winter to say. Moss walked back down to the lamp and saw that his own boots had left two prints in the road, and beside them, faint in the mud, a heart.