Colour tattoo of the outline of California filled with the state flag, showing a red star, a brown bear, a green stripe and the words California Republic, on the side of the torso.

California flag state outline on the side

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the outline of California filled with the state flag: a red star at the top, a brown and black bear walking across a pale band, a green stripe and a red lower section. The lettering reads California Republic in dark bold capitals, with part of the word cut off at the edge. The bear and flag areas use soft shading, while the outline is a fine dark line set against light skin.

Ribs State outline Flag Bear Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bear had got out again, so Dell Harrow spent the Tuesday chasing a painted animal around Carrow Flats with a pot of ochre and a stepladder. It had walked off the side of the co-op silo sometime in the night, leaving a pale rectangle where its shoulders had been. Mrs Ibsen from number nine rang to say it was asleep under her washing line, which Dell doubted, since bears that size do not sleep in suburbs.

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He found it at the creek, standing in the shallows with its paws in the mud and looking back over its shoulder the way it always did on the wall. The star on its flag had faded to a pink smudge. Dell had mixed that pink himself in 1994 from a tin of rose madder meant for a barber's pole, and the council had complained ever since that the state was not supposed to look so cheerful. He crouched on the bank and held out a brush loaded with grey, the colour of old fog, and the bear sighed.

The bear let him walk it back up the lane, mostly because it wanted the green stripe mended first. Dell did the stripe in a long afternoon, then the red band along the bottom, then the lettering, which had never quite fitted the width of the silo and was always cut off at the edge. When he finished, the bear stood where it belonged with its head turned towards the coast, and Dell realised it had never been looking back at him at all.

At dusk Mrs Ibsen brought a plate of biscuits up the ladder and asked whether it would be out again tomorrow. Dell said probably not, and meant it for about a week. Somewhere past the county line a lorry driver had stopped to photograph the silo, and the bear, which had a long memory for the roads it had been painted to face, was already working out which one led south.