Colour tattoo of a brown bear's face with geometric facets and watercolour splashes, on the upper arm of a man in a grey shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bear on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bear's head faces the camera, drawn with bold black outlines and faceted, angular shading in browns and oranges. Teal and pink watercolour-style splashes and loose linework extend around the edges of the bear. The tattoo fills most of the upper arm, with the man's shirt sleeve and a wooden floor visible in the background.

Geometric Upper arm Bear Animal Wildlife Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate had lain under a tarpaulin on the Skerray slipway since the Tuesday boat, and by Friday the gulls had given up on it. Morag pried the lid with a bent chisel while the tide turned. Inside, wrapped in newspaper gone soft as cloth, was a bear's head carved from a single block of alder, its planes cut so sharp they looked folded rather than shaped. Someone had painted it the brown of peat water, then flicked teal and a bruised pink across it, as if the paint had been thrown in a hurry.

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The label named a mainland gallery that had closed the spring before. Morag carried the thing up the brae on her back, the head knocking her spine at every step, and set it on the sill of the net loft where the wind came through the slats. Nobody on Skerray bought carvings. They traded them: a bear for a sack of potatoes, a bear for two oars mended. She ran a thumb along the angled cheek and found the old varnish cracked into a grid like frost on a window.

That winter she did not sell it. She sat with it through the long dark hours, scraping the paint back to the grain and laying it on again, one colour at a time, until the splashes sat where the spray broke against the rocks below the loft. In March the ferry came in with a man looking for a boat hook. He stopped in the doorway, saw the bear, and asked whose it was. Morag told him it belonged to whoever could say where it had been meant to go.

He was quiet a long while. Then he said his grandfather had carved bears for a gallery on the mainland and had never once been paid for them. Morag handed him the hook without a word and turned the bear to face the harbour mouth, so it could watch the boats come home.