Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear silhouette filled with pine forest

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a bear walking to the right, with its body filled by a double-exposure image of tall pine trees. The trees are rendered in fine, textured black marks, so the forest shows through the bear's outline. The bear is shown in full on a plain white background, with the shape centred and the forest tops rising above the back.

Bear Pine tree Forest Silhouette Wildlife

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bear came down off Corran Ridge the week the mill whistle stopped, and by the time it reached the top of Mill Street the whole town had gone to its windows. Ada Swale counted the trees on its back first, the way her father had taught her to count stands before a cut. Forty-one, she made it, the tallest ones rising from its shoulders like smoke from a chimney, and none of them were ones she recognised from the hillside above her own house.

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Nobody in Tarrow Bend had cut anything in the high country since the Haskell contract went bad in '53. The men had argued about it over tea at the Co-op for a year, and then they had gone up with saws anyway, quietly, one slope at a time, selling the wood down the valley to buyers who did not ask. Old Mr Haskell said the forest would grow back. The bear, it seemed, had come to ask him about the timing.

It did not hurt anyone. It walked the length of Mill Street at the pace of a man carrying a bad weight, past the shuttered Co-op and the sawdust pile gone grey with rain, and stopped in front of the Haskell gate. The trees along its flank shivered and let go a fine black dust that settled on the cobbles like ash. Then it lowered its great head and waited.

Ada went out in her slippers and stood beside it. By morning the gate was open, the sawdust had sprouted pine seedlings in its cracks, and the bear was a dark shape on the ridge again, walking away with the forest still standing on its back.