Colour splash tattoo of grey and coloured paw prints with blue, green, pink and purple washes on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style paw prints on the upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several paw prints in soft grey and black shading, with a thin green line running up through them. Blue, pink, purple, green and orange splashes and small dots surround the prints and spread across the upper back. The soft, blended edges and loose composition give it a painted, splattered look against the skin.

Back Paw print Splash Splatter Dot

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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

The paint tins had been stacked by the door since Tuesday, and Ada Morrow had counted them twice before she noticed the prints. Someone had walked through the wet blue on the back step and out across the gravel: four toes and a pad, then four toes again, spaced like a dance somebody had been taught and then forgotten. The dog was in the yard, grinning at her, a grey and white collie with a mouth full of brush bristles.

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She followed the tracks anyway. They crossed the lane, swerved past the chapel railings and went under the hawthorn at the bottom of Mill Street, where the old chalk pit filled with rainwater every spring. There, on the flat stone by the water, the prints stopped and turned into splashes. Someone had painted a whole pattern in the moss with a wet paw: violet smeared into pink, pink dripping into green, a thin green line running up the trunk of the tree as if a brush had been dragged up it by its tail.

Ada sat on the stone. The collie sat beside her and looked at the water, which was the colour of a bruise going yellow. She thought about her father, who had painted the sign above the bakery for thirty years and never once got the lettering level, and about how he would have laughed at a dog doing his job better than he ever had. Behind her the church clock struck eleven, late as always.

When she got back, the tins were open and every lid had a paw print pressed into its rim. She took the brush, dipped it in the grey, and made one more print on the step, careful to leave it a little blurred at the edges, the way the rain would have wanted it.