Black ink dreamcatcher with hanging feathers and a flock of small birds on the upper back of a person with hair tied up.

Dreamcatcher and birds on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black dreamcatcher with a circular web, beaded centre and three hanging feathers sits on the upper back, with a small flock of birds flying away to the lower right. The linework is bold and mostly filled, with little shading or fine detail. The design is entirely black on bare skin against a pale, softly lit background, and it is placed slightly off centre.

Back Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Web Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net-mender's daughter had been told to stop asking why the boats went out in the dark, so she asked the gulls instead. They told her nothing, but they left feathers along the harbour wall, grey and black and sometimes white, and she gathered them in her apron while her mother cursed the tide.

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That winter the nightmares came to the cottages along Salt Row. Men woke shouting about water coming through the hull, and their wives lay awake listening to the wind. Ada took a hoop of willow from the boatyard, wound it with tarred twine the way her mother mended nets, and knotted a web across it so tight that a moth would tear itself on the strands. She hung three feathers from the bottom and a string of blue glass beads from the centre, then fixed it above the window of the room where her father slept.

Her father slept through the next storm without a single cry. But the web had caught the bad dreams all night, and by morning it was crowded with them, grey shapes tangled like flies in a spider's larder. Ada didn't know what to do with them. She took the web down, carried it to the end of the mole, and shook it out over the sea. The dreams went flat and dark on the water, then rose in a tight cloud and broke apart into small black birds that wheeled once over the harbour and flew south, away from the coast.

Her father came down to breakfast and said he had dreamed of nothing at all. Ada kept the web. Every autumn after that, when the swallows left and the boats came in late, she shook the hoop out over the water, and every spring a few birds came back to the mole, looking as though they had never been gone.