Solid black bear silhouette in a blackwork design, with white spiral swirls and dots cut into the body, shown as a flat drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black bear silhouette with spirals

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black bear standing side on, with its head turned to the left. White spiral swirls and rows of white dots are cut into the black body, creating the pattern. The image is a flat, high-contrast drawing in black and white with no shading or grey tones, centred on a plain white background.

Blackwork Bear Spiral Dot Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ysolt had been told the bear's pelt was bad luck to carry down from the high pines, so she left it folded on the flat stone and walked the goat track alone with the salt sack on her hip. The river had come up in the night and the ford was a brown rope of water. Her uncle's mule was already halfway across, stubborn, talking to itself the way mules did when they had decided something.

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She stopped on the bank to think. Her grandmother had cut spirals into the drying boards of every house in the valley, round and round in the wood, and said that water followed them the way it followed a child's finger tracing a bowl. Ysolt had always thought it foolish. Now she knelt, pressed a palm into the wet clay, and drew a spiral with her thumb, then a second beside it, then a row of small hollows the way the old woman had shown her with a pin. The clay went dark where her fingers had been.

Behind her, something heavy shouldered out of the alder scrub. She did not turn. She heard it breathe, slow and close, and then the crack of a branch as it settled on its haunches. The mule had stopped mid-stream. The water, when Ysolt looked again, had split around the stones in long curling channels, and the ford lay open and shallow like a road pressed into the earth.

She walked it with the sack on her shoulder. On the far bank she turned once. The bear stood at the edge of the alders, black against the grey light, its head turned towards her, and across its flank the pale spirals seemed to turn with the river. She lifted a hand. It did not follow her over.