Black ink drawing of a walking bear filled with pine trees and flying birds, shaded with dots and fine hatching on white paper.

Bear silhouette filled with pine forest

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bear in profile walks to the right, its outline filled with a dense scene of tall pine trees, with a small flock of birds rising above its back. The forest is rendered in fine black linework and dense stippling, while the bear's body is shaded with dotwork and hatching. The design is set on plain white paper with a gel pen, earphones and a folded map at the edges of the frame.

Dotwork Bear Pine tree Bird Forest Silhouette Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had the survey map pinned under a stone on the bonnet when the bear came down the firebreak, walking the way a man walks home from the pub, unhurried and faintly put out by the world. She did not reach for the radio. She had been sent up to count dead ash for the estate, not to argue with wildlife, and the bear was not looking at her anyway. It was looking at the rooks lifting from the pines behind it, as though it had called them and they had come.

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Its back was dark with timber. From the lodge she had watched the forest on the far ridge and taken it for a plain dark line, but up close the trees seemed to climb through the animal's coat, tall and close and stitched into every hair, so that the bear carried the wood with it the way a coat carries rain. The old keeper said bears remember where the woods used to be. Ruth had laughed at him over her tea that morning. She did not laugh now.

She followed it along the break, counting stumps as she went, and every time it paused the nearest pines bent a little toward her, as if listening. At the burn the bear waded in and did not come out on the far bank. By dusk she had only the map to show for it. Beside the stone where she had left it, a pencil ring sat around the place the bear had stood, and beside the ring, in handwriting she did not recognise as her own, someone had written forty years.

She folded the map into her coat without telling anyone. The next morning the stumps along the firebreak were sprouting green, and a small black bird sat on the Land Rover's wing mirror, watching her start the engine as if it had been asked to.