Black and grey dotwork bear head tattoo with geometric shading on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bear head on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bear's face is tattooed front-on, with its ears, eyes and nose outlined in heavy black linework. The head is filled with stippled dots and angular geometric shapes that shift from dense black to pale grey, giving it a faceted look. The design sits centred on the ribcage against plain, lightly lit skin.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Bear Animal Geometric pattern

Find an artist for this

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

Every August the bear came down from the scarp to the Pell orchard, and every August old Hanna Pell counted the windfalls before she let him have any. She laid them out in rows along the wall and notched each one with her knife, because her father had told her that a thing counted is a thing owed, and a debt left standing will bring the creditor back.

Keep reading

The bear was not a large one as bears go. His coat was grey where the frost had got into it and black where the shade stayed, and his face had the flat, fitted look of something built from many small pieces. He sat at the wall with his eyes half shut while she counted. Three summers running she counted true, and three summers running he took his share without a word and went back up the scarp with the sun on his shoulders.

The fourth year the tally came out one short. Hanna counted again, and again, and found the same gap, and went cold, for she knew who had taken it. She walked up the scarp with a basket on her arm and found him at the spring. "You are one apple short," she said. He looked at her with those round, looping eyes, then pressed one broad paw into the wet clay and drew it slowly across a flat stone. Where the apple should have been, a cluster of black seeds rose out of the grey, each one as small and exact as the dots on his own face.

She carried the basket down empty and said nothing to anyone. The next August she laid out the windfalls as usual, and at the end of the row she left one more, and when she looked up from the wall the bear was already gone, and the dew on the stone where he had been sat in dots, as if someone had counted it.