Black tribal-style bear head design on a white background, drawn as a flash sheet with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal bear head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing bear head drawn in bold black tribal linework, with swirling curls on the ears and flame-like patterns across the forehead and cheeks. The muzzle and nose are solid black with white cut-out details, creating a strong contrast. The design is centred on a plain white background with no colour.

Blackwork Bear Tribal Animal Head

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 bear came down Quay Lane the morning the mackerel stopped running, walking on the cobbles as if it had paid for the road. You were mending nets on the slipway when Mrs Tregear shouted that it had come out of the fog with its head held low, and by the time you climbed the steps it was sitting outside the chandlery, looking at the sea with eyes like two burnt holes in a sail.

Keep reading

Nobody in the town would touch it. Old Pascoe said a bear in the harbour meant a boat was owed, and the boat owed was the Margaret Ann, lost off the Stones eleven winters back with her skipper's son aboard. You knew the swirling curls on its ears were the same scrollwork Pascoe's father had cut into the transom, and the flames that ran up its brow were the flames he had painted on the lamp-posts the night they searched.

You took it a mackerel, because that was what you had in your coat. The bear ate it slowly, its solid black muzzle working around the white cut-out of its teeth, and then it stood and walked back into the fog the way it had come. In the morning there was a single white feather stuck to the tar of the slipway, and out on the buoy the Margaret Ann's old bell was ringing with nothing to ring it.

Pascoe came down at dawn, lifted the feather from the tar and said nothing. You went back to the nets. By noon the boats were out again, and the fish, for the first time since the spring, were running thick under the hulls.