Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a snarling bear head with scrolling foliage above and feathers below, on the inside of a forearm.

Snarling bear head on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling bear head with bared teeth and a lolling tongue fills the centre of the forearm, with fur rendered in fine hatched and stippled lines. Curling acanthus-style foliage rises above the head, and long feather or leaf shapes fan out below it. The tattoo is shaded entirely in black and grey against a soft, out-of-focus background.

Neo-trad Blackwork Forearm Bear Snarl Acanthus Foliage Feather Leaves Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They were still arguing about the bear when the urn boiled dry in the back kitchen of the Cross Keys function room. Nobody at the reunion had seen it, but everybody had heard of it, the way children hear of the thing under the bridge. Old Tom Barraclough swore it had walked through the playground the autumn they were eleven, its head crowned with bracken and ash leaves, and that it had stood at the gate and snarled until the bell rang.

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Maggie Ryle, who had sat behind him in maths, said that was nonsense and then told it anyway. The wood on Hollin Fell had been cut for the new car park, she said, and a bear with no trees to hide in has nowhere to put its anger. It wanted something to bite. The teachers gave it the dinner lady's old satchel and it went back up the hill content, leaving feathers caught on the railings like washing.

The rule, Maggie said, was that you gave it something back before the bell. Tom had nothing to give. He had been the boy whose father sold the timber, so the bear took the blue coat off his back, the one with the sawmill name stitched on the pocket, and carried it up the fell. The sawmill closed the next spring.

Tom laughed and reached for his pint, then looked at the hook by the door where his fleece hung, its collar threaded with a single green leaf. The lights went down for the raffle. In the dark, somebody at the back of the room began, very quietly, to growl.