diff --git a/docs/implementation-plan.md b/docs/implementation-plan.md
index 4df3b44..038ea19 100644
--- a/docs/implementation-plan.md
+++ b/docs/implementation-plan.md
@@ -258,6 +258,7 @@ Current failure modes:
 - thin oblique outline features can still collapse into mushy transitions
 - the right-hand guard wing can still lose short dark-light-dark adjacency motifs
 - on tile-graph specifically, the remaining failure is less about wrong colors entering the candidate pool and more about the propagation step preferring a smoother local arrangement than the sharper initial assignment
+- the new phase-field path has one obvious blemish on the pinned badge: the dark contour along the sword tip widens too much in a localized patch now recorded in `tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-tip-focus.json`
 
 Current status:
 - on the cleaned fixture, the continuous path now lands at `0.0832` source-fidelity in the reproducible probe under `artifacts/badge-final-probe/`, which is materially better than the older documented `0.1494` result and better than naive resize under the same lattice
diff --git a/tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-tip-focus.json b/tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-tip-focus.json
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..31607e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-tip-focus.json
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+{
+  "description": "Sword-tip focus crop for the pinned phase-field badge run. Use this when testing the widened dark contour / stroke blemish near the tip.",
+  "input": "tests/fixtures/real/ai-badge-cleaned.png",
+  "reconstruction_mode": "phase-field",
+  "target_width": 126,
+  "target_height": 126,
+  "phase_x": 0.0,
+  "phase_y": -0.2,
+  "steps": 48,
+  "cell_bbox": [67, 90, 97, 122]
+}