Paw Print Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a paw print tattoo means

A paw print is the one animal tattoo that is not a picture of an animal. The dog and cat pages are about faces, poses and likeness; a print is the mark the animal left on a kitchen floor, a beach or a clay disc at the vet's, and it means presence and absence at once, something was here and has walked on. That is why it is so often a memorial, and why people who would never wear a portrait of a pet will wear its print.

It is also the most private of the pet tattoos. A portrait introduces the animal to everyone who sees it; a print is recognised as a paw by strangers, but whose paw, and why, stays with the wearer. Two prints side by side, one large and one small, can be two animals, a mother and her young, or a pet that died and one still at home, and the design never has to say which.

Not every print belongs to a pet. A bear's print, with five toes and long claws, and a wolf's, larger than most dogs', are worn for what those animals mean rather than for a companion: the bear for protection, the wolf for loyalty to a pack. Tracks are how most people ever meet a wild animal, as a mark in mud or snow left by something that passed unseen, and a print suits that kind of distant closeness.

The additions on this page each move the meaning a little. Hearts for toe pads say love plainly; an infinity line through the main pad says the bond did not end; a crescent moon, a halo over a name or a rose laid across the print lean towards remembrance; a bone beside it is simply a dog that was happy. Mandala patterns inside the pads treat the print as something sacred rather than something sad.

Outside grief there is loyalty of another kind. American college teams, Clemson University's orange tiger paw among them, have turned the print into a badge, and a paw in team colours means a place and a crowd rather than an animal.

Where the design comes from

The print came to tattooing late and from outside it. Old flash had panthers, bulldogs and eagles, animals chosen as emblems, and the paw print arrived instead through the pet-loss keepsakes that vets and pet crematoria now routinely offer grieving owners: clay impressions and inked paper, framed on a shelf long before anyone thought of putting one on skin. Its companion text is the Rainbow Bridge, a short prose poem about pets waiting for their owners in a meadow, which circulated among pet owners through the 1980s and 1990s and whose authorship is still disputed. The oldest paw prints anyone has are far older than tattooing's interest in them: Roman roof tiles and bricks, walked over by a dog while the clay was drying, turn up on sites across the former empire and sit in museum collections from Britain to the Rhine.

Choosing yours

• Settle the species first, because the prints are not interchangeable. A dog's print carries claw marks above the toes and its toe pads are oval. A walking cat keeps its claws retracted, so it leaves rounder pads with no claw marks, and its main pad is broader, with three lobes along the back edge where a dog's has two. A bear leaves five toes. People who know animals notice, and a cat memorial drawn with a dog's claws is an easy mistake and a hard one to unsee.
• The most personal version is the animal's real print. Most vets and pet crematoria will take one in clay or ink, and many owners already have one in a drawer; an artist can trace it at life size, keeping the uneven pads and the slightly splayed toes that make it one animal's print and not a stock shape. Bring the original rather than a photograph of it, so the scale is right.
• Five shapes and the gaps between them are the whole design, and the gaps are what fail. Under about 3 cm the skin between the toe pads fills as the ink spreads and the print becomes a blob with bumps, so keep the pads well apart or go a little larger than feels necessary. Solid black pads last longest; outlined pads with patterns inside them, like the mandala and faceted prints here, want 6 cm or more.

Common questions