Realism tattoo of a worn teddy bear inside a grey scrolled frame with leafy detail, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teddy bear portrait in an ornate frame on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A worn teddy bear sits centrally inside an ornate scrolled frame with oval medallions at the top and bottom and leafy sprigs above. The bear is rendered in soft, smooth shading with fine fur texture and highlights, and its face and paws are detailed. The frame and foliage are in black and grey, while the bear is in brown tones, giving a mostly muted palette.

Realism Upper arm Frame Scrollwork Leaves Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learned the frame trade in Hollin Bottom, where the lane gives out at the edge of the larches. Mrs Ashby brought the bear in a carrier bag on a wet Thursday, wrapped in a tea towel, and set him on your bench without a word. One ear had been stitched twice, the nose rubbed down to a grey pebble, and one glass eye had been swapped for a button of a slightly different brown.

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She wanted a frame that would not shame him. You spent three evenings carving scrollwork from walnut you had cut yourself, the wood behind the chapel where the storm took two limbs in March. You cut the leaves so they curled outward, as if reaching for the window, and you set an oval medallion at top and bottom. The centre you left plain, because she said he had spent enough years being looked at.

When she came back, she didn't look at the frame at first. She turned the bear over and pressed her thumb into the soft patch on his belly, where the stuffing had gone thin from being held, and nodded as though she were counting something she already knew the total of. "My sister won him at the autumn fair," she said. "She was nine. She said he was the only prize that didn't ask her to do anything back."

You hung the frame in the shop window that evening, after the rain had cleared off the larches. The last light came low through the lane and caught the carved leaves, and the bear sat in the middle of them, looking out at the empty road as though somebody might still be coming up it.