Black dotwork drawing of a walking bear filled with pine trees and birds, shown on white paper as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear silhouette filled with pine forest

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A walking bear in profile is drawn as a silhouette, with its body filled by a forest of pine trees and a small flock of birds rising above its back. The linework is built from fine stippled dots that shade the trees and the bear's outline, with denser dots at the edges. The drawing is in black ink on plain white paper, with a pen and earphones placed at the edges of the frame.

Dotwork Bear Pine tree Forest Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomasz, the bear came down off the ridge again on Tuesday, and this time I was the one at the barrier with the logbook. Stefan had the flu, so the morning shift was mine. I stood in the grey hour before the lorries with my tea going cold on the sill, and I watched it cross the gravel the way it always does, unhurried, shoulders rolling, as if the fence were a rumour it had decided not to believe.

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Its back was full of pine. You know how the trees thicken near the top of the slope, how they go dark and close together? That was the bear: a whole forest pressed into its shape, needles like fine grey dust, and above it a scatter of small birds lifting off as though someone had shaken them loose from the branches. Stefan's nephew asked if it was real. I said it was only real the way the hills are real, which he did not like.

The officer on the far side, Hrabal, waved it through without looking up from his form. Nobody stamps a bear. The bear paused at the white line, lowered its head, and for a moment the forest on its back seemed to lean towards us, towards the cabin and the bins and the flagpole, as if it wanted to see the paperwork. Then it stepped over and the birds went with it, and the gap in the trees behind it was the same gap I have been looking at since you left.

I have not written about the cutting because I did not want to make it into a letter. But the bear took half the sky with it when it went, and I thought you should know the pines are still standing on its back. Come home when the road opens. Bring the good scissors, the ones Mama kept in the drawer.

Ola