Full back tattoo in bold colour with the word Boston, a roaring bear, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics motifs and a Patriots figure, shown on a man's back.

Boston sports back piece with bear and team mascots

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece combines the word Boston in script with a roaring brown bear, a red Red Sox sock on a baseball, a Bruins B logo, a basketball, a cartoon colonial figure holding a football and a leprechaun-style figure, with jersey numbers scattered across the design. The linework is bold and outlined, with flat fills and shaded highlights in red, green, yellow, brown and blue. The composition fills the whole back with the lettering across the top and the characters arranged in the lower half.

Traditional Neo-trad Back Bear Skyline Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been drumming on the tarpaulins at Haymarket since dawn, and by four o'clock the stallholders were stacking their crates of oranges and pretending not to watch the bear. He sat on an upturned fish box by the cod barrels, shaking water from his ears, while the leprechaun in the green waistcoat spun a basketball on one finger and told anyone within earshot that the Celtics had never needed a bear to win anything.

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The bear did not answer that. He was too busy glaring at the colonial soldier, who had arrived late with a football tucked under his arm and numbers chalked across his coat like a boy's homework. The soldier said the city had been his since the powder days, and the bear growled that the city had been his since before anyone thought to name a street after a tea party. Somewhere behind them a Bruins flag flapped on a stall pole, its yellow B bleached pale, and nobody bothered to point out that it was the only one still dry.

Then a red wool sock came tumbling down the gutter, a baseball tied inside its toe, and it rolled to a stop against the leprechaun's shoe. The stallholder's daughter, nine years old and wearing her dad's cap, ran out in the wet to fetch it. She stuffed the sock back under the bear's arm and told the three of them to sit still before they caught their deaths.

They sat. The rain kept on. By closing time the bear had shared his fish box, the soldier had lent the leprechaun a dry handkerchief, and the football, the ball and the baseball all rested on the same crate, their faded numbers running together in the wet until only the name across the top still read clearly.