Colourful geometric bear tattoo in blue, pink, purple and red on a woman's upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Geometric bear on a shoulder blade

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A bear in side profile walks to the right, built from angular facets of blue, pink, purple, red and black. The shading is soft and speckled, giving the faceted panels a textured, almost airbrushed finish. The tattoo sits centrally on the shoulder blade, with the subject's back and hair filling the rest of the frame against a plain beige wall.

Geometric Back Bear Animal Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stove, you'll singe your eyebrows. Now listen. When the snow came down so thick on the Vardal pass that the goats stopped bleating, a bear walked out of the glass cliffs. Nobody had seen a bear in those hills for forty winters, and she was not a bear the way your uncle is a bear, all fur and grumbling. She was made of planes, like a cut-up lantern. Every side of her caught a different light: a slab of blue where the dusk came off the ridge, a split of rose where the sun touched her at noon, violet in the hollows, and a red so hot that the herders said it was her heart showing through.

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A girl named Ilse, who mended nets for the salt boats and had no patience for legends, went up after her with a sack of barley and a clay pipe. She had a sister lost in the thaw, and she meant to ask the bear for her back. The bear did not answer. She only turned her head, slow as a door swinging, and walked on to the right, always to the right, the way the river runs when it means to get somewhere.

Ilse followed for three days. Each evening the bear stopped where the rock was flattest and left a small clear shard on the stone, and each morning Ilse picked it up and found it was a window looking down on her own village, the lamps lit, her sister stamping snow off her boots at the door. On the third morning there was no shard. There was only the bear's track, pressed into the frost, and beside it the print of a small bare foot, walking in step.

The sister came home that spring. Ilse never said where she had been, but she kept the barley sack, and to this day it is said that the bear still walks the pass, looking back only to be sure someone is following.