Black and grey snarling bear head tattoo framed by a chevron border across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling bear head on a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large snarling bear head with bared teeth fills the centre of the upper back. The bear is rendered with bold outlines and shaded areas in black and grey, with fine hatching on the fur and muzzle. A wide border of zigzag chevron lines frames the bear in a square shape across the shoulder blades.

Back Bear Snarl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the rope won't catch your heel, and mind the lamp. You want the bear that rode the Gannet out of Stromness in the year the herring failed. Nobody aboard had bought it a passage. It came down the gangway at dusk, shouldering the rain, and the mate swore it had been a man once, until it turned its head and he saw the teeth.

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It was no ordinary beast. It bore a border on its back, grey zigzags like the lines a child draws for mountains, and when the wind got up the chevrons seemed to march inward, counting the crew. Old Tam Harcourt, who kept the wheel, said the bear was keeping the score. Every man who lied about his drink, every boy who cut the bait short, the bear bared its teeth at him through the wheelhouse glass. Nobody slept well on that boat.

Then came the night the sea stood up off the Pentland Firth like a wall of wet slate. The engine coughed and died. The bear padded forward into the spray, and the men who had hated it saw it lay its great head on the bow rail and roar. The sound went out over the water, and the waves, as if struck, broke into rows of white chevrons and cleared a lane through the dark. They came home through it, every one.

Tam said he never saw it again. But in the morning the bow rail was scored with four long grooves, and the Gannet has sailed under that bear's mark ever since. Pass me the tea, lad. Mind, the story gets no truer for the telling.