Spider in The Bear

I took my seat in the pub named The Bear. Two large men in their fifties were sitting at the bar with pints of bitter before them. One of them possessed a gut you could park a Mini Cooper in. His companion was not quite as large, but was still sturdily built: he was totally bald and he had shaved his eyebrows off, the better to display the lurid tattooed flames that were licking over his forehead. In fact, the entirety of his head and neck was thus inkily illustrated. These tongues of stylised red and blue  flames pitchforked their way up the centre of his massive head and swept around to threaten the shield of a famous football club that had been expertly etched into his left temple; I imagine he must have had a similar shield on his right, too, as everything possessed a methodical central axis symmetry. The entirety of his dome was a writhing abstract maelstrom of red, blue and green swirls and darts. His large beak of a nose was also fully illustrated: it had a little tableau of green and blue lozenges down each side, and a central 'parting' down its great hook. His mouth was surrounded by more hooks of flames, which seemed to attempt to gain entrance. Even the delicate swirls within his large, Buddha-lobed ears had been pictogramatically inscribed, and I wondered just how far the tattooist had ventured around this spiral of cartilage as it led into his head: perhaps his delicately stretched ear drum might have a tiny portrait of a famous footballer inked upon it, gently fading over time in this dark, miniature, very private, personal gallery. He turned to face me at one point, and in his great mournful face I saw the whole life history of his pain, which was slathered over it.

His big brown eyes were full of the deepest, ingrained sorrow: silver studs were thrust through each of his great slabs of eyebrows. I felt the sudden desire to embrace him, just one injured human being to another. Of course I did not do so.

The little flames danced about his mouth as he continued his conversation with the man with the car inside his belly and, through the channel where once all of his top front teeth used to be, I saw the flash and glint of a large silver stud that now lived in the centre of his tongue.

Behind him, as he sat on the chunky wooden barstool, was an amateurish mural of a kind of polar bear which had been painted, so the inscription said, sometime in the 1940s: it was only the fact that it was perched on a cartoon chunk of drift-ice that gave its species away because it actually resembled an over-stuffed greyhound. It, too, had a haunted, out of place look about it as it surveyed its artificial backdrop surroundings.

The barmaid brought the man another pint of bitter and said, "There you go, Spider". It made me sad to think that his entire identity had been stripped away and reduced forever to the spider's web tattoo that I now saw across the back of his hand.

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