He’s still there in spirit — and in ink.
Devastated by the loss of her beloved bull terrier, Robyn Moscrop decided she couldn’t go on without him — so she got his ashes inked into her skin.
The 27-year-old first rescued Bronson in 2019, and made him “spoilt rotten” until he passed unexpectedly at 3 years old last year.
While getting a commemorative tattoo of a cherished canine isn’t too far out, Moscrop went the extra mile by having her pup’s ashes mixed in with the tattoo ink so he can literally be with her forever.
“Having his ashes on me means that he’s always going to be with me, no matter what,” Moscrop, from Birmingham, West Midlands, told South West News Service. “It’s not something I could lose or misplace, it’s always there. Seeing it when it was done was really emotional, I did have a cry.”
She received the unique ink from her tattooist boyfriend George Ricketts, who re-created Moscrop’s favorite portrait of Bronson.
“Sometimes I talk to [the tattoo] as though I talk to him,” she revealed. “It sounds silly, really, but sometimes when we’re at places, and say I’m just wearing a t-shirt, I just think, ‘Oh, he’s here with me seeing all this, too.'”
Now, she said it gives her “closure” that “he’s always with his mum now” and will “never ever be forgotten.”
But no tattoo can fill the Bronson-sized hole left in her life — which led her to adopt yet another bull terrier named Alabama, who is now 2.
“If I didn’t have my new dog, I’d find it really hard to speak about him,” she said. “But since I’ve got Alabama, she’s kind of filled that hole that he’s left and made it a lot easier to heal because it is awful losing your dog.”
The animal lover grew up around bull terriers, and was instantly drawn to stray dog Bronson, who was deaf, when she finally adopted a dog of her own. Of course, he charmed her immediately.
“He was a crazy dog. He made such an impression on everyone because he had such a personality,” she said. “He just kept me really busy and I’d see other people with their really well-behaved dogs and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh my god, why can my dog not be like that?'”
Still, she “absolutely loved him” — quirks and all — and spoiled him with a bed of sheep skin and Laura Ashley blankets. She even planned playdates for him, filling up his “social calendar” to create an “incredible life” for her “special” pup.
“He’d sit on my lap like a baby and I’d cradle him, even though he was absolutely huge,” she recalled. “He loved to be dressed up as well. I’d dress him up for Halloween and he’d have hats and crowns for his birthday.”
So, when Bronson passed away on July 10, 2021 she found it “really, really difficult.”
“All my family and friends just couldn’t believe it when it happened. He’s always all over my social media so everyone knew him really well and he’s met so many people,” she said, adding that “everyone knew who he was.”
“Even people who didn’t know me personally would stop and say, ‘there’s Bronson’ he was really well known in the area that we live in.”
Bronson, a bit of a local canine celebrity, was later cremated after his death.
“I had him cremated and it was there where the woman who ran the cremation said, ‘Oh, I’ll take some of his paw prints and I’ve heard that you can have ashes put into a tattoo,'” she said.
While Moscrop had never heard of such a thing before, her tattoo artist boyfriend said he had heard of other artists who designed similar tattoos. In December 2021, she sat for eight hours while her boyfriend created the commemorative ink.
“The portrait I had of him is from my favorite photo of him — you can see on his expression that he’s so happy and his eyes are sparkling,” she said, adding that she would recommend it to any animal lover who’s lost a pet. “My boyfriend was like, ‘This is serious pressure, I need to make sure I get it right,’ but as you can see, he’s done an absolutely fantastic job.”
In fact, it’s really the only piece of body art that has any meaning to her, admitting that the rest of her tattoos are “all meaningless.”
“I do think it’s a really nice way for people who like tattoos to remember someone by having the ashes mixed in, it’s really special,” she said. “It’s like having a part of them in you and with you.”
