Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bear wearing a top hat and riding a unicycle, with stars, a crescent moon and branches, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear in a top hat riding a unicycle

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bear wearing a top hat rides a unicycle at the centre of the design, framed by an oval of stippled ground, bare branches and small stars and a crescent moon. The shading is built from dense dots and short hatched strokes, with clean black outlines defining the bear's body, the wheel and the spokes. The piece is entirely black and grey and sits on the outer thigh with the skin tone visible around it.

Dotwork Thigh Bear Top hat Star Crescent moon Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bear arrived at Mrs Pellow's boarding house on the second Tuesday of September, the only day the sea fog lifted enough to show the pier. You were polishing the brass rail of the front step when he came up the path, top hat tipped against the drizzle, a unicycle balanced on one shoulder like a rolled umbrella. He asked for a room with a view of the water, and you, having nothing better to do than be curious, showed him the way up the stairs.

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For a week he rode the unicycle along the promenade at dusk, round and round the bandstand, never once coming off, while the gulls stopped their squabbling to watch. Mrs Pellow said bears were bad for the carpets. Mr Haddock in room four said bears were bad for the sherry. But the fishermen on the slipway began leaving him crab shells and a jar of their best tar, and the children of Cold Harbour Row chalked stars on the pavement for him to ride between.

On the seventh night the tide came in faster than anyone expected and drowned the causeway. You found him at the end of the pier, wheel turning slowly, looking up at the thin silver moon. "I can't ride on water," he said, and he sounded almost embarrassed. So you walked out beside him, the planks cold through your shoes, and held the handlebar steady while he counted the waves aloud, one, two, three, until the causeway showed its stones again.

In the morning he paid for his room in brass buttons and was gone before the kettle boiled. Mrs Pellow found the top hat on the newel post. Nobody ever learned where he went, only that a pair of wheel tracks ran straight out across the wet sand towards the bare trees at the edge of the marsh, and that the tide, for once, did not follow them.