Colour tattoo of a bear silhouette filled with mountains, pine trees and a lake, with bold black outlines, on the inner forearm.

Bear silhouette filled with mountain landscape

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a bear in profile, outlined in bold black, with its body filled by a mountain range, a row of pine trees and a lake with horizontal reflection lines. The mountains use orange, brown and grey shading, the trees are green chevron shapes, and the sky is a soft grey stipple. The bear's paws rest on the arm, and the composition fills the whole silhouette edge to edge.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Bear Mountain Pine tree Lake Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 14 January. Snow to the sills again, and the road past Cold Tarn has gone under it. Five guests in the front rooms, two of them asleep since supper, and the boiler still making that noise like a cough. Mr Okonedo from the survey office has been at the window since lunch with his tea going cold, counting the bear's tracks in the yard.

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He says there are eleven sets now, all leaving the same line from the pines down to the water. My father would have said the bear was simply hungry and would be gone by the thaw. He also said the lake froze from the middle outward, which it never does, so I stopped taking his word on weather years ago. Still, I went out at dusk with the lamp, and the tracks ran straight to the edge of the ice and stopped, as if the animal had walked into the lake's reflection and kept on going.

I thought of the flash pinned above the kitchen hatch, the bear with the whole valley inside it, the pines standing up through its ribs and the water laid across its belly in grey lines. The travelling man who sold it to my father said the bear was only a case for the landscape, that whatever you carry, you carry the whole place. I told him that was daft. Tonight I am not so sure. The stove is hot, the guests are sleeping, and out past the light something large is moving slowly along the shore, taking its time, as if it knows the way home better than we do.