Colourful geometric bear face tattoo on the upper arm, built from pink, teal, purple and orange facets with soft gradient shading.

Geometric bear face on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bear's face is formed from angular, faceted shapes with dark eyes and a pale muzzle. The shapes are filled with pink, teal, purple and orange, with soft airbrushed gradients that blend from light to dark within each facet. The tattoo sits on the outer upper arm and fills the frame against a plain skin background, with a white wall and blurred drawings behind it.

Geometric Upper arm Bear Geometric shape Facet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three in the morning the corridor on Ward 6 has stopped pretending it is daytime, and you are pushing the linen trolley past the lift lobby when the bear looks up at you from the noticeboard. It is pinned beside the fire notices and the rota for bank staff. Someone has cut its face into triangles and filled each one with a different ink: pink, teal, a bruised purple, and a burnt orange that fades to nothing at the edges. The muzzle is pale as milk and the two eyes are real, small and dark and glossy, like something picked off a beach.

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The night staff call it the Lantern Bear because the teal facets glow under the strip lights while the purple ones swallow them. Nobody on days knows who drew it. Mrs Okafor in bed four says it came in a brown envelope the week the boiler failed, with no name on it, and that the eyes were grey pebbles then, before someone glued the new ones in. You tell her that sounds like a story. She tells you that is what a story is for, and she goes back to her crossword.

At twenty to four you stop by the board with a marker in your pocket, the fine black one you use for labelling specimen pots. You draw a single line across one of the orange facets, a crack running from the ear toward the nose. You tell yourself it is a joke for whoever comes on at six. When you return from the sluice the line is still there, but the orange has shifted, pooling into the crack like light into a broken window.

At seven the day porter stops beside you and frowns at the noticeboard. He says the bear is new, that it must have gone up overnight. You say it has always been there. Neither of you looks at the eyes, which are turned now toward the swing doors, as if they are waiting for someone to come through.