Colour tattoo of a snarling black bear head inside an orange C with blue outline, sitting on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear head in a C logo on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black bear head with an open snarling mouth sits centrally within a large orange letter C outlined in blue. The bear is rendered in flat black with pale highlights, and the shapes have bold, even outlines. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a close crop of skin, with a second arm and a blurred background at the edges.

Upper arm Bear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the coal dust on that bench. Aye, the Corrie Dunmore. Forty-one days out of Hull with a hold of pit coal and a skipper who thought the Atlantic was a lake he could bully. Her figurehead was a bear, carved from a single larch by a Norwegian called Halvard who drank his wages and never once finished a sentence. He gave her the bear's head reared back, jaws open, as if it meant to take a bite out of the weather.

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The paint was the trouble. The owners wanted the company's initial on her bow, a big letter C ringed in blue, and Halvard painted it in ochre because that was the only tin he could find in Bergen. Orange, the cabin boy called it, and the boy was right, the colour of rust on a wet dock. The bear sat inside that letter like a prisoner who had been given a fine room.

On the thirty-eighth day the glass fell through the floor. We lost the foresail and two men to the rigging, and the skipper stood in the wheelhouse shouting at God to take his bloody bear if that was what He wanted. Halvard, half-drowned, crawled out along the bowsprit with a mallet and a chisel and began knocking at the bear's jaw. Nobody knew why. The rest of us thought he had gone soft in the head.

When we made the Humber, the bear's mouth was wider than it had been, and the grain had split along the tooth line. The skipper never mentioned it. Halvard never explained. The Corrie Dunmore is a hulk at Goole now, rotting in the mud, but her bear still snarls at the tide with the C flaking away around it like a debt nobody came to collect.