Black fine line tattoo of a bear built from overlapping circles and dotted lines, with Roman numerals X and VI, on a pale arm.

Geometric bear with Roman numerals

Geometric · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bear walking to the right is formed from overlapping circles, arcs and dotted guide lines, with the Roman numerals X and VI set inside the body. The linework is thin and precise, with small dots at the joints and circle intersections, and the piece is rendered entirely in black ink on pale skin. The bear fills most of the frame, with the arm surface and a dark background visible below it.

Geometric Fine line Other Bear Circle Roman numeral Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it's the last one in the village that still burns true. You want the Orrery Bear? Then hush and listen, because it doesn't like being talked over.

Keep reading

It was built by a clockmaker named Ilse Varley in Greyhithe, the town the sea took when the old tower fell into the estuary. She made it from rings she dragged up from the mooring engines, every circle a wheel that turned once for each season. Where two rings crossed she set a brass pin no bigger than a lentil, so you could find the joints in the dark with a thumb.

Ilse could never agree with herself about the numerals. She carved an X into the shoulder for the ten hours the town used to keep, and a VI into the ribs for the hour the water came over the wall. She wanted the bear to carry the hours the town had lost. Every dusk it walked east along the seawall, always to the right, because that was the direction the sun had gone when she was a girl.

One winter the bear stopped at the wall's end and would not move. The villagers came out with lanterns and argued about whether it was broken. Ilse's granddaughter, Mara, knelt in the wet grass, pressed her ear to its flank, and heard the wheels inside counting. "It isn't stuck," she said. "The dotted lines are guides, not cages. It's waiting for the tide to turn." By morning the sea had drawn back, the wall was dry, and the bear's prints ran both ways along the sand.