Black and grey realistic anchor tattoo with a dreamcatcher and hanging feathers on the side of a ribcage.

Anchor and dreamcatcher on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey anchor runs diagonally down the side of the torso, with a dreamcatcher with a radial web pattern at its top and two feathers and beaded ends hanging from its base. The anchor uses smooth grey shading and highlights, while the dreamcatcher is drawn in fine black linework. The photograph is taken at close range with a glossy sheen on the skin, and the subject's face is not in frame.

Realism Ribs Anchor Dreamcatcher Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You know the anchor was never really about the sea. Your grandfather carried it up the Hartlepool hill on a Sunday in March, a dented iron thing he'd bought off a scrap man in Seaham for two shillings and a bottle of Vimto, and he set it down in your mother's back yard like a man planting a tree. Nobody in Easington Colliery had seen the sea from a pit wagon, but everybody knew what an anchor was for. It was for holding on.

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The dreamcatcher came later, from the Saturday market, where a woman with a cardboard box of hoops and sinew sold them to the miners' wives for sixpence. She told your nan it would catch the bad dreams before they reached the bed. Your nan hung it on the anchor's shank because there was nowhere else to hang it, and for thirty years the two of them sat there in the yard together, rusting in the rain, feathers going grey, the beads knocking softly when the wind came off the North Sea.

When the colliery closed, the yard was the only thing nobody argued over. You took the anchor the week after the funeral, wrapped in a bed sheet, and drove it south on the back seat of a borrowed Escort. At the first services on the A1 you stopped, got out, and sat on the kerb with it across your knees. The web was still whole. Every bad dream had been caught, you thought, and none of them had got past the iron. You put your hand through the spokes of the web and felt, for the first time in weeks, that the thing was light enough to carry.