Matching blackwork and dotwork bear paw tattoos with ornate feather-like patterning on the top of both feet.

Bear paws with ornate patterning on both feet

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos of bear paws are shown on the top of both feet, with claws visible at the toes. The upper portions feature ornate, feather-like patterns filled with fine lines and dots, while the paw pads use stippled shading. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the pair is shown centred against a dark leather surface.

Blackwork Dotwork Other Bear Paw Claw Feather Pattern Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there's a pit prop lying across it, and don't go staring at the slag heap while I'm talking, it doesn't like being stared at. Now. My grandmother's brother went down the Glynfach shaft the spring the bears came off the mountain. Nobody had seen a bear above the tree line in forty years, and yet there they were at dawn, a mother and two cubs, walking down the old tramway as if they held the lease on it.

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He saw the mother stop at the cage gate. She lifted one forepaw and set it flat against the iron, and the whole cage rang like a chapel bell. Feathers grew out of the fur along her shoulders, grey and brown, fanned out the way the deacon fans his hymn sheets on a cold Sunday. Fine lines and dots ran over her pads like frost creeping across a window, and every claw was worn black from years of digging.

The men on shift laughed at him when he came up, of course they did. Then the overman went down to see for himself, and he came back up quiet. The bears had pressed their feet into the coal dust on the cage floor, and the prints led straight through the gallery to a seam nobody had dared open since the explosion. The men followed them that night, and they struck air clean and sweet where the old books said there was only firedamp.

So when you go down, you follow the paw, not the lamp. And if you find feathers in the dust, you stop, and you thank them out loud like a fool, and you'll come up again.