Neo-traditional design drawing of a woman wearing a black bear head as a headdress, framed by a ring of gold and red feathers on a black background.

Woman with bear headdress and feather crown

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised woman with long wavy red hair wears a black bear's head as a headdress, with its snout resting above her forehead. Behind them, a halo of gold, orange and red feathers fans out, and a small circular medallion with a web-like pattern sits above the bear. Bold outlines and fine hatched shading define the fur, hair and feathers, with warm reds and golds set against the black background.

Neo-trad Woman Bear Feather Headdress Hair Medallion Dreamcatcher Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bear came down into the valley the week the geese went over, and nobody in Hollin Ferry was surprised, because Maud Tennant had been leaving her back door open since August. She said a bear that had walked all summer on the high fells deserved a dry doorway and a bowl of something warm. The neighbours thought she had gone soft in the head. The postman stopped posting letters through her box and started handing them over the gate.

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By November the bear slept under the stairs with its great nose on its paws, and Maud was busy with feathers. She gathered them from the beck and the stubble fields, heron grey and buzzard brown and the odd gold one a jay had dropped, and she bound them to a willow hoop with red wool and blue glass beads. The medallion she made from the face of a broken clock, scratched all over with a spider's web. 'Keeps the bad dreams tangled,' she told the bear, which yawned at her in a way she chose to take as agreement.

The trouble came at Candlemas. A man from the council arrived with a clipboard and a letter about dangerous wild animals, and he stopped dead in the hall when the bear lifted its head off the rug. Maud did not raise her voice. She lifted the feathered hoop and settled it over the animal's brow the way you would set a hat on a child, then told the man the bear had signed the lease in spring. He read the letter twice. Then he laughed, folded it into his coat, and went back out into the sleet.

In March, when the first lambs were up on the slopes, the bear went back to the fells. Maud found the hoop hanging from her gatepost the next morning, the clock-face medallion turned towards the hills, with one new feather tied on, pale as a blade of spring grass.