Woman who tattooed her dog’s paw prints on her breasts worries it’s made her undateable

Back in 2007, when Adele, then 18-years old received paw prints tattooed on her breasts in homage to her beloved family dog Max, she believes she’d love them forever.

Newfoundland Max has just turned eight which is the average life expectancy of his breed, and Adele wanted a permanent reminder of his furry companion, ready for when the inevitable happened.
So she got a big paw print tattoo on each breast, each eight inches wide and three inches tall.

Adele, then an undergraduate tootle to the neighborhood tattoo studio in her hometown of Leicester with a photograph of a paw print she’d printed from the Internet, along with a tracing of Max’s lost giant paw.

She spent an hour perfecting the design with the tattoo artist and left feeling pretty chuffed, after paying £100.

Notwithstanding her nan saying she expected the tattoo would ‘rub off’, Adele was initially very happy with it.

"I went to university in Portsmouth, where everyone noticed my tattoos, which I loved," she recalls.
"I was a buzz of freshers, always getting my boobs out and showing my tattoo off.  I guess it became my "thing".”

However, her feeling of ecstasy only lasted a year, when people began to make their unpleasant comments.

"I started receiving negative remarks and being called names like “paw Tits”. They were the first thing everyone noticed," says Adele.

“Everything became about my boobs and tattoos, and not about me.
"Even if they were a little on the show and someone noticed, I’d shake and want the earth to swallow me up."

The 28-year-old who is now a charity worker said she changed her style completely to cover her tattoo.

"I hate my breasts and what I've done to myself," she remembers.

"I started wearing high-neck shirts, even in summer." I will be sweating just to be able to cover them. "
Adele says that her love life has been affected by her paw prints, saying that "her self-confidence has been shattered by them."

"I am sure that is the reason I have not had many relationships lasting for more than a month in 10 years," she reveals.

“Blokes get the wrong idea about me; they think I'm easy which is not what I am at all."
Adele now started laser therapy at a clinic in Leicester, which uses the technique to remove 20,000 tattoos each year.

She is understandably quite excited.

"I cannot wait to have my paw prints removed," she says.

"The clinic does this by allowing the light produced by the laser to pass through the skin and break up the tattoo ink into tiny particles, which are removed through the body's immune system.

"It will take 18 months and it will cost £1,000, but it would be worth it if it means that I can be happy in my own skin."