Black ink dotwork drawing of a walking bear whose body is filled with pine trees, with birds flying above, shown on white paper beside a gel pen.

Bear silhouette filled with a pine forest

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bear in side profile walks across the page, with its body filled by dense pine trees and a few birds flying above its back. The outline and forest are built from stippling and fine hatched strokes in black ink, giving the shading and texture. The drawing is centred on white paper with a clear gel pen below it, a folded map at the left edge and white earphones at the top right.

Dotwork Bear Pine tree Bird Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want to know why the bear walks so slow, and that's because it carries the whole wood on its back, every pine of it, and the birds too, though the birds never agreed to be carried and go where they please anyway. My grandfather's grandfather saw it come down off the ridge above Kettle Lake the autumn the mill closed.

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The men in the town had cut the old pines for three winters, and the bear had watched them from the spruce line, patient as a clock. Nobody thought the trees were the bear's business. But when the last cart rolled out, the bear came down the hill and stood in the square with sawdust settling on its shoulders, and the pines began to grow out of it, one by one, thin and dark, until it was walking the way a forest walks, all shadow and sap.

Mrs Haldane at the post office, who had a tongue on her, asked it plainly what it wanted. The bear looked at her, then at the empty lot where the mill had stood, and then it simply kept walking north, slow, the birds lifting off its back one at a time like sparks from a grate.

They say the wood it carried is still up there where the stumps were, which is why the town has never quite stopped being green in the wrong places. Every spring the bear's prints turn up in the mud by the lake, and if you stand very still you can hear, somewhere over the ridge, a small bird asking whether it's time yet.