Black and grey illustration of a standing bear filled with geometric mandala-style patterns, drawn on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental bear design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A standing bear shown front three-quarter, with its head turned towards the viewer and its body covered in dense ornamental patterns. The linework is fine and precise, with layered petals, diamonds, scales and small circular motifs filling the head, legs and torso. The image is entirely black and grey on a white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Geometric Bear Mandala Ornament Pattern Animal

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

The lift at Heron House had been dead since Tuesday, so I was on the ninth-floor landing with a bucket of sugar soap when the bear first seemed to speak to me. Not speak, exactly. Each layer I scraped off the wall gave up another piece of it. Forty years of magnolia and gloss had sealed in a standing bear, head turned towards the stairwell as if it had been waiting for someone to come up the steps.

Keep reading

Mrs Adeyemi-Pryce, who had lived in 9C since the block opened, told me the first tenant painted it in 1968 with Indian ink and a pair of drawing pins for compasses. He did it over one dull winter, a petal at a time, so the stairs would have something to look at besides the damp. Later tenants kept adding to it. Each new family left a diamond or a scale on the legs, until the animal was armoured in shapes that stood for everyone who had ever waited for a lift here.

By the third afternoon I had reached its left foreleg, where the ink was finest. Each small circle was a letterbox, each scale a kitchen window, and I could have named the flats by the paws. When I finally got the sponge to the last claw, the paint came away clean and the bear's eye, a tiny dot I had taken for a knot in the plaster, looked straight at me.

I didn't tell the council. I bought a tin of matt black and a fine brush, and on Sunday I sat on the top step and drew the thing again, one petal at a time, while the lift stayed dead and the bear kept its patient watch over the stairs.