Colour tattoo of a white polar bear beneath aurora, stars and a green moon in an oval panel on the upper arm.

Polar bear under northern lights on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

An oval panel shows a white polar bear silhouette standing on rippled blue and green water lines, beneath a night sky with teal and blue aurora bands, a green moon and four white four-pointed stars. The shapes are flat and graphic, with solid black behind the scene and smooth, softly shaded aurora areas. The panel sits centrally on the upper arm against plain skin.

Upper arm Star Moon Water Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grandmother Ingrid always began the sea stories with her hands, and she began this one by pressing both palms flat on the table as if the wood might roll. The boats had been ice-bound off Tromsø that winter, the Sigrun and two others from the fleet, and the men had gone out across the frozen sound on foot to cut the nets free before they rotted. Her brother Anders went with them, though he was too young to be trusted with a knife.

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They found the bear on the far edge of the floe, sitting upright like a man who had been waiting for the bell. Nobody spoke. It looked at them the way a clerk looks over spectacles, then turned its head to the sky, where the lights had come down over the water in green curtains and a pale moon hung low enough to touch. Anders said afterwards that the stars were so close he could have counted them for pennies. The bear lifted one forepaw, slowly, and set it down again on the grey slush, and the whole crew stood still until the lights dimmed and it slid off into the black water with barely a ripple.

They got the nets free by midnight. Not one of them mentioned the bear at breakfast, and Anders was the only one who didn't go back to sea that spring. He ran a small shop instead, selling tinned peaches and rope, and every winter he hung a lantern in the window facing the sound. Grandmother said that was how you knew a man had seen something he couldn't fit in his pocket.