Black bear inside a rust-orange oval with small leaf details on the upper arm of a person wearing a grey vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear in an oval on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black bear face and head fill the centre of an oval design, with a rust-orange background behind it. Thin leaf or fern sprigs run down both sides of the oval. The shading is mostly solid black with some softer orange tones, and the design sits on the outer upper arm against a plain pale backdrop.

Upper arm Bear Leaves Fern Oval

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab Corrie had been feeding the bear for three summers before anyone thought to ask why it never came to the rope. The fair pitched each spring on the common outside Hexham, and the bear lived in a cage behind the big wheel. The showman called it Old Tolly because it would not answer to anything grander. Nobody paid it much mind except Mab, who brought it the heels of bread from the candy stall and talked to it about the weather the way you talk to a neighbour over a fence.

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Then the frost came early that autumn, and the showman sold the bear to a man from the coast who wanted it for a tent of his own. Mab walked the wagons all night in her good boots. At the last caravan, past the hedge where the bracken had gone rust-red in the evening light, she found the cage door hanging open and a trail of broken fern stalks leading off into the trees.

She followed the trail up the Tyne valley until the sky turned the colour of a dying coal and the wind dropped. There, in a clearing ringed with copper ferns, sat Tolly, tall as a doorway, his muzzle gone grey with age. He looked at her the way a man looks at a debt he has already paid. "You kept your word to me," the bear said, "so I will keep mine." He lowered his great head, and Mab climbed on and held his shoulders while he carried her back through the ferns to the gate of the fair.

In the morning the wagons were gone, and the common lay empty except for a single black hair caught on the wire of the feed bucket, and a smell of bracken smoke that stayed in her coat for a year.