Black fine line tattoo of a walking bear in front of stippled pine trees and a crescent moon, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear, pine trees and crescent moon on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bear in outline walks left in front of a row of tall pine trees, with a crescent moon above them. The bear and moon are drawn in clean, even single lines, while the trees combine thin outlines with dotted shading in the foliage. The image is in black ink and grey tones only, photographed straight on against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Calf Bear Pine tree Forest Crescent moon Moon Tree Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bear came down to the harbour the same week the Morag Rose lost her second net, and nobody on the fleet would call that a coincidence. I was nineteen and new to the Skerrol boats, gutting herring on the slip with my sleeves rolled past the elbow, when Fergus Lamont dropped his knife and pointed up at the hill behind the ice house.

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It walked left along the quay in no particular hurry, its shadow stretched long under the sodium lamps. Behind it the ridge bristled with pines, black as burnt matchsticks against a sky the colour of pewter, and above them hung a crescent moon thin as a filleting knife. Nobody threw anything. Isla Marr carried a bucket of gutted mackerel to the top of the slip and set it down, and the bear ate with a sort of manners that made the men look away.

That night the nets came up heavy, more than the fleet had hauled in a decade. Fergus said the bear had been paid. Isla said it was the other way about, that the sea had been owed a creature from the woods and the woods had sent one to collect. I didn't believe either until I walked the shingle at low tide and found its prints heading inland, each one slowly filling with water as though the ground had been waiting for it.

The tracks ended at the tree line. I left the last mackerel on a flat stone and turned back to the harbour, where the lights were small and yellow and the boats knocked gently at their ropes. Behind me, in the pines, something large was walking away from us, not hurrying, the way you walk when you already know the path.