Fine line tattoo of a baby polar bear and a baby penguin with a small blue snowflake above them, on the ankle.

Baby polar bear and penguin on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a baby polar bear sitting upright and looking up towards a blue snowflake, beside a baby penguin seen from behind and turned slightly towards it. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey and white shading on the animals and pale blue and pink wash on the snow and bear. The image is a close, straight-on photo of the ankle, with the design centred on the skin.

Fine line Ankle Penguin Snowflake Snow Winter

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the brazier, because the wind off the Humber has teeth tonight and so has the fair's old bear. Now. You'll want to know how the cub came to be standing on the frozen mud behind the dodgems, looking up at the one flake of snow that had got loose from the sky.

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Her name was Marguerite Pyke, though everyone called her Mags, and she kept the penguin in a tin bath under the ghost train because the penguin would not sleep anywhere it could not see the stars. The bear she had won in a card game off a sailor in Grimsby, a cub no bigger than a loaf, and for three winters the two of them rode the same wagon, the bear eating herring out of the penny-slot bin while the penguin waddled along the tailboard counting the lamps.

The turn came in February when the fair stopped at the tideline and the frost came down so hard the canvas rang. Mags found the cub standing at the edge of the ice, staring up at a single flake hanging in the lamplight, not falling, as if it were waiting for permission. The penguin had waddled out after him and stood beside him, and neither would move. Mags sat down on an upturned crate and let the cold get into her boots, and she did not call them back, because some things are only ever seen by two creatures at once.

They went north in the spring, the story goes, or the bath was found empty and the bear's chain lay in the snow with no bear at the end of it. Ask the lamplighter at the next fair. He'll tell you the snowflake is still up there, and that if you stand just right beneath it, you can make out two small shapes, one looking up and one looking at him.