A black and grey bear head flash design with detailed fur linework and shading, shown on a sepia watercolour background.

Bear head design in sepia tones

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A front-facing bear head drawn with layered, feathered fur linework and soft shading in browns and greys. The eyes are amber, the nose is solid black, and a small diamond shape sits between the brows. The design is set on a cream and sepia watercolour wash with dark splatter below the chin.

Traditional Bear Animal head Fur Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the one Dai Pryce broke his ankle on, and leave the old lamp hook alone, it isn't yours to touch. Right, sit by the range and I'll tell it the once, because you'll only ask again. This was the hungry winter of the strike, when the lamps went out at the Ffynnon pit and the men stood about the gate with their hands in their pockets. That was when the bear came down off Carn Ddu. Nobody saw it come. One morning it was just sitting in the lane between the chapel and the coal yard, big as a wardrobe, with its eyes gone amber in the lamplight and its nose black as a lump of anthracite.

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It didn't rob the bins or frighten the children. It sat at the pit gate every morning and watched the shift go down, the way a foreman watches a new lad. Idris Vaughan went out with a shovel one day, meaning to shift it, and he got as far as the first lamp post before he stopped. The bear looked at him the way the manager never had, straight and patient, as if it had been waiting a long time for someone to ask it a question. Idris came back in and said nothing, which for Idris was a speech.

That was the week the surveyors said the east seam was dry. The bear got up, walked to the slag heap under the old fan house, and sat down beside a fall of rock that nobody had bothered to clear. There was a diamond of pale light set into the stone, the same shape as the mark between its brows, and when they chipped it open cold water came rushing out, clean enough to drink. The village lived on that water until the new bore came in. They say the bear went back up the mountain the same week, and the seam never ran dry again.

Every March after, there's a lump of coal left on the chapel step at dawn, unbroken, with the shape of a diamond in the grain. My mother swore it was the bear's way of saying thank you. My father said it was just a bloody coal merchant with a sense of humour. I'll let you decide which of them was right, but you'll drink your tea first.