Black and grey bear head tattoo with ornamental geometric shading on the side of the ribs, with an arrow tattoo partly visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear head tattoo on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bear's head is shown facing forward, filled with dark ink and fine grey shading in a symmetrical, ornamental pattern. It sits on the side of the ribs, with an arrow tattoo and part of another design visible behind it. The image is a close side view, with the rest of the body and face out of frame and a teal top and a yellow-walled room in the background.

Geometric Blackwork Ribs Bear Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent came down on a wet Tuesday, and the bear would not climb into the cart. Mab Orrin stood in the mud with a heel of bread in her hand and told it what she had told it every morning for eleven years, that the road was long and the bread was short. The bear only looked at her with its round, patient eyes, the way it looked at children who threw coins into the ring.

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Nobody in the show could say where the bear had come from. The ringmaster swore it had been bought off a Dutch ship in the year of the great frost, and the ringmaster had never told the truth before noon. What the company did know was that the bear could be sent to the far corner of the field with one word, and that it always came back with something in its mouth, a glove, a child's hair ribbon, once a silver watch that the strongman had sworn was lost in the sea.

So Mab took her father's old hunting arrow from the wagon, the one with the crow feathers, and walked the bear out past the dead lamps to where the common met the wood. She put the shaft into its paw and said the four lines her mother had taught her, the ones older than the road. The bear sat a long while. Then it stood, went in among the birches, and did not look back.

In the winters after, the village children swore they saw it on the hill above the mill, grey as frost, its face turned toward the empty fairground. The old women said it had learned the way home was the way out. Mab never said anything about it. On cold mornings she would find frost on her kitchen window in the shape of a bear's head, very serious, with a single arrow scratched through it, pointing at the door.