Fine line tattoo of a bear built from overlapping circles and arcs, with Roman numerals inside, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric bear with Roman numerals

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A walking bear is drawn in black single-needle linework and formed from overlapping circles, arcs and dotted guide lines. Roman numerals, including what appear to be XI and VI, sit within the circles across the body. The design is in black ink on pale skin, shown in a side view across a horizontal crop.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Bear Circle Arc Roman numeral Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The minute hand over platform four had stuck at twenty past six again, which meant the bear had worked loose from its wheel. Nobody at Harrowgate Junction seemed to know there was a bear. I knew because I had climbed the iron ladder behind the clock face the winter the old stationmaster died, and found it there: a brass animal no longer than my forearm, its body built from rings, each ring cut with a Roman numeral so the whole beast read like a dial.

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I kept it oiled through the damp months and taught myself the escapement from a library book with a cracked spine. On night shifts I walked the platforms with a lamp, watching the bear's shadow slide across the waiting room tiles as the last goods trains rattled through, circle turning inside circle. The timetable said the final service left at ten to midnight. The bear, I came to believe, kept a different schedule.

On the night the signals failed, I went up with a pocket torch and found the foreleg marked VI had sprung free of its arc. I set it back with a hairpin and a drop of watch oil, and when I climbed down the platform clock read a quarter past six and a woman in a grey coat stood beneath it with a single ticket in her glove. She looked up at the bear's shadow, then at me.

"You've put him back the wrong way round," she said.

I hadn't. But I turned the leg to suit her, and the platform lamps came on one by one down the line, and the bear began, very slowly, to walk.