Pet Portrait Tattoo Ideas for Dogs and Cats

What a pet portrait tattoo means

A pet portrait is a likeness of one animal that other people will never check, and that is both its freedom and its trap. Nobody in the street knows whether the ears were quite that shape; the owner knows at once. So the tattoo has to satisfy one viewer completely, and the craft lies in finding the two or three features that made that animal itself and getting those exactly right.

Those features are rarely the ones a camera flatters. A tabby carries a dark M on its forehead, which folk legend credits to the Virgin Mary or to the Prophet Muhammad stroking a favourite cat. A French bulldog's likeness sits in the bat ears and the single wrinkle across the brow, which is why the linework face here needs no shading. A white blaze, one ear that never stood up, a notch from an old fight: the owner should name these before the artist starts, because they are what turn a breed into a pet.

Many are memorials. The beagle with a thin gold halo and small white wings is the most explicit, a pet angel on the pattern of Christian memorial art. Quieter pieces show the animal on an ordinary day, the golden retriever with a stick, another at full run, a dog asleep in a curl, and many owners find those easier to live with than a halo, because they recall a life rather than a loss.

Not every one is a goodbye. People tattoo a living animal to mark the day it came home, the years it got them through, or a pair who belonged together, like the shaggy dog and the dachshund touching noses here. A ginger cat asleep inside a crescent moon says nothing about death at all; it records a habit, and a habit is often the truest likeness there is.

Where the design comes from

Owners commissioned likenesses of their animals long before tattooing. A chained dog guards the entrance of the House of the Tragic Poet at Pompeii in mosaic, above the words Cave canem. Thomas Gainsborough painted a Pomeranian and her puppy around 1777, and in 1837 Edwin Landseer made Victorian Britain weep with The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, a collie resting its head on its master's coffin. Edinburgh put up a statue in 1873 to Greyfriars Bobby, the Skye terrier said to have kept watch at his owner's grave for fourteen years. The linework faces and blackwork silhouettes here are the newest answer to the same wish.

Choosing yours

• Photograph for the artist, not for the album. Get down to the animal's eye level, use daylight from a window and turn the flash off: dogs and cats have a reflective layer behind the retina, the tapetum lucidum, and a flash turns their eyes into flat green or gold discs that nobody can draw from.
• Choose the format by how far you trust the photographs. Realism, like the tabby with every whisker drawn, needs a sharp, well-lit reference and 10 cm or more. If the only pictures are old or blurred, a linework face, a silhouette or a watercolour pose depends on shape rather than fur, and forgives what the camera missed.
• Ask for the fur the way it grows. Hair changes direction over the brow, around the eyes and down the muzzle, and a portrait whose strokes all run one way looks like a soft toy.

Common questions