Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a bear silhouette with white constellation lines and star dots, on the outer ankle.

Bear silhouette with constellation on ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bear silhouette in solid black ink, shown in profile with its head to the right and legs planted. White linework and dots trace a constellation across the body, with a brighter star at the shoulder and smaller stars along the limbs and tail. The shading is flat black with speckled dotwork around the outline, and the design sits centred on a pale lower leg against a dark leather surface.

Blackwork Dotwork Ankle Bear Constellation Star Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Morag Strachan had mapped the parish of Glenarrow for thirty-one years and never once got the stars to sit still on the paper. The bride's father wanted the bear on the wedding invitations, the one his own father had pointed out from the byre door, all shoulders and rump, with the stars laid over it exactly. 'Like a dog lying down on its own blanket,' he said, which was not the sort of thing a surveyor could measure.

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She went out after the ceilidh with a torch in her teeth and a flask of cold tea. The sky over the loch was clear enough to count the stars along the hind leg, seven of them, and the brightest one, the one that always sat at the shoulder, had slid a finger's width east since her childhood. She sat on an upturned creel by the gate and tried to fix it with a pencil, rubbing out and redrawing until the graphite shone.

Near two o'clock the bride came out in borrowed wellingtons, her dress bunched in one fist, and stood beside her. 'Dad says you're putting him in the wrong place,' she said. Morag held up the sheet. The bride squinted, then traced the line with her fingertip, not on the paper but on the cold air above it. 'No, he's walking. Look, the back foot's lifted.' And it was. Morag had drawn that bear standing still for thirty years because she had never once watched one move.

They pinned the new sheet to the barn door in the morning, the bear striding east at last, one foot raised, the shoulder star a little behind where the sky had put it. Morag kept the first drawing in the drawer with the tea-stained sheets, the one where he stood still, and she never told anyone which was right.