Black and grey photograph of two paw print tattoos on the side of a ribcage, each filled with ornamental blackwork patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two paw prints on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two paw print tattoos sit one above the other on the side of the ribs, each with four toe pads and a main pad. The pads are outlined in solid black and filled with intricate ornamental patterns, with the detail more visible in the lower print. The black and white photograph is taken from the side at close range, with a grey garment in the lower frame and a striped fabric at the right edge.

Blackwork Ribs Paw print Paw Mandala Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost on the Ostrel road had gone hard overnight, and you could see from the far end of the bridge that the prints were not yours. Two sets, one walking behind the other, the larger pads pressed deep and the smaller ones barely touching the crust. Every pad was outlined in lace, a whorl of frost-ferns inside each, so the snow seemed to have been stitched. Ysmere's hunters called them the Quiet Hounds, though no hound in the kingdom had ever left a track like that.

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Your mother kept the bell tower at Caddon Fell, and she had taught you that a track is a sentence the ground writes for you. This one said the animals had come down from the high pasture while the snow was still soft, turned at the mill wheel, and gone back up together. Nobody in the valley had seen them. Only the miller's boy swore he had heard a low note under the water, the sound a bell makes when someone rests a palm against it.

So you followed them. The trail led past the frozen sheep pens and the shuttered chapel of Saint Orra, where the ornaments inside each pad seemed to hold the dawn light longer than the snow around them. At the top of the ridge the prints stopped side by side, and the crust was unbroken beyond them, as if whatever had made them had simply decided to stay.

You stood there until your fingers numbed, reading the lace of their paws. Then you pressed your own glove into the snow beside theirs, and the ground, which had never once kept a record of you, kept this one. Come spring, the bell at Caddon Fell rang twice without anyone pulling the rope.