Dotwork bear face inside a botanical wreath with a snowflake, tattooed on a forearm in black and grey ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear face and botanical wreath on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stippled bear face with a small dark nose and reddish mouth sits at the centre of the design, framed by a dotted circle, leafy sprigs, a snowflake and small flowers. The linework is fine and the bear is filled with dots rather than solid shading, giving a folk-art feel. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, with the composition arranged symmetrically around the bear on the inside of the forearm.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Bear Snowflake Leaves Flower Wreath Dot

Find an artist for this

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

The bear came down from the high pines every winter when the snow reached the cairn at the crossing, and the guards at the stone post learned to leave a dish of honey on the wall for her. Nobody had ever seen her cross. She simply appeared on the far side in the mornings, sitting among the frost-killed thistles as though she had been waiting for someone to notice her.

Keep reading

Old Mirela, who kept the customs hut on the eastern side, said the bear was a border herself, a line that walked on four legs. Her nephew Tomas laughed and said she was only a bear who liked honey. But the winter the river froze hard enough to walk on, a boy from the western village tried to carry his sister's wedding silver through the pass in a flour sack, and the snow came down so thick that he lost the path entirely.

He did not die. He sat under a spruce with the sack in his lap, and a broad grey shape came down the slope and lay against him until the cold went out of his hands. When the search party found him at dawn the bear was gone, and the snow around the boy was dotted with tiny white flowers in a ring, the kind that should not have been blooming in January.

Mirela took the silver off him without a word and burned the sack in her stove. Each winter after that she left a wreath of rowan leaves on the wall beside the honey, and the guards stopped asking what the bear was guarding. Tomas still leaves the honey each thaw, and he has never once seen her ask for papers.