Black and grey realistic tattoo of a bear paw print with shaded toe pads and a textured main pad, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear paw print in black and grey

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

A bear paw print fills the frame, with five toe pads and a large textured main pad rendered as raised, three-dimensional shapes. The pads use dark solid ink with fine stippled texture on the main pad, and soft grey shading around the edges creates a sense of depth. The image is in greyscale with no colour ink, and the design is centred on a plain background of skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

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The prints came down from the hill again on Tuesday, right through the frost on the fish quay, and I swear the largest one stopped square outside the smokehouse door as if it had knocked. Five toes, each pad as deep as a teacup, and in the middle a heel the size of a dinner plate with the frost still standing up in its ridges. Dad would have measured it with a bit of string. I just stood there in my wellies with the kettle going cold behind me and thought about you.

Mrs Oake from the chandlery says it is the same animal that took the Harrow boy's goat in the autumn, and that the council will send a man with a rifle if nobody deals with it. I have put out the lid of the old fish bin, the one that won't shut properly. I have also put out a dish of the bad herring nobody will buy, because I could not bring myself to be the sort of woman who lets anything starve on her doorstep just because it frightens her.

The strange thing is the marks lead nowhere. They go down to the water, step by step, and stop at the slipway where the tide is high enough to hide everything. Ruth thinks it swam. I think it walked out along the old breakwater in the dark, the way you used to walk the rail when you were nine and Mam was shouting at you from the window.

I have kept the best cast in a bucket of plaster in the net loft, so you can see it when you come home at Christmas. Come home. The pads are still there when I look, pressed into the white like a signature, and every morning I wait to see whether it has signed for you too.

Love, Nell

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