Black fine line tattoo of a bear on the inner forearm, with the sleeve rolled up and a map beneath the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bear tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bear in profile, reaching forward with one front leg, is drawn on the inner forearm. The body is filled with fine parallel hatching that gives it shading and texture, while the outline is a thin, clean line. The tattoo is in black ink only, set against pale skin, a dark rolled-up sleeve and a printed map at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Bear Animal

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrowgate House has been broken since March, so you take the stairs up to the eleventh floor with the atlas under one arm and the pen case knocking in your coat pocket. Uncle Len is waiting on the landing with the door propped open by a bucket of sand. He does not say hello. He says the bear is still in the wrong place.

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The bear is a polar bear from the atlas, a grey print from 1961 that he cut from a printer's proof and kept, and it has hung on his kitchen wall for thirty years. You have been copying it for a month. Every line must sit a hair from the last, he says, and you must never go over a stroke twice, because ink forgives nothing. You work at the kitchen table with the Ordnance Survey sheet spread beneath your wrist so the paper does not stick, and the bear grows out of the hatching one line at a time, shoulder first, then the reaching foreleg, as if it were stepping out of snow towards a stranger.

Len taps the map. "Where's it going?" You point to the blue-grey wedge of coast on the northern edge of the sheet, a place none of the streets on the estate are named after. He nods slowly, as if he has been waiting for you to choose it yourself.

When you finish, the lines are so fine the bear looks more like weather than an animal. Len holds the page up to the window and says nothing for a long time. Then he says the lift will be fixed by Tuesday, and you both know it won't, and the two of you carry the map down eleven flights anyway, one step at a time, the bear folded safely inside it.