Black and grey realism tattoo of a dreamcatcher with a feather and beads on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and feather on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven web, a dangling feather and a string of beads hangs down the left side of the ribs. The feather is shaded with soft grey gradients and fine detail in the barbs, while the hoop and web use crisp linework. The photograph is black and white, with a fabric scarf at the top left and a navel piercing below the tattoo.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Web Hoop

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

Listen, because the old ones never told this one in daylight. Down in the terraces of Pellow Street, where the gasworks used to stand, there was a clockmaker called Ada Frint who could not sleep for the traffic. Every night the lorries rolled past her window like great grey sleepers, and every night she lay awake counting the lamps through the glass. So she did what her grandmother had done in the hill country, and she hung a hoop of willow over her bed, wove it with thread the way a spider works, and tied a single grey feather to its bottom edge with a string of wooden beads.

Keep reading

The web caught nothing for a month. Then one wet Thursday a boy came up the stairs with a bag of coal and stopped dead in the doorway. He had dreamed, he said, of a city where the roads ran upward and nobody had to hurry. Ada asked him to sit. She gave him tea with too much sugar and the feather turned slowly on its thread between them, and he told her things he had not told his mother. The web kept hold of the words and let the noise of the lorries fall straight through.

By spring the stairs were busy. Ada never charged for the listening, only asked each visitor to leave one thing behind, a button or a ticket stub, and she threaded them through the lowest beads so the feather grew heavier and the hoop sagged like a tired moon. When the council came to pull down the terraces she was the last to leave, and the last thing she took down was that willow ring. Ask anyone in Pellow Street now where the dreams went, and they will point at the sky above the new flats, where something grey and feathered still turns on a thread, and the lamps go out one by one.