Black and grey realism tattoo of a dreamcatcher with beads and a feather trailing down the side of a ribcage.

Dreamcatcher and feather on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a circular hoop, woven web and central bead sits above a long shaded feather with thin beaded strands and curled wisps. The linework is fine and the feathers are shaded with soft grey gradients to suggest texture and depth. The image is in black ink and grey tones only, photographed close up on the side of a torso with a navel piercing and jeans visible at the lower edge.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Web Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have found the windfalls before you do, so you step around the split Discovery on the path and count the rows the way Uncle taught you, eleven trees to the stone wall, then back again. The grass is the colour of old pennies. Somewhere past the last tree a tractor is idling, and the air smells of crushed fruit going sweet.

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The hoop hangs from a nail in the packing shed, where it has hung since the spring your aunt bent the willow into a ring and bound it with waxed thread. The web inside is tight and even, knotted at every crossing, with a single dark bead at its centre like a pip nobody bothered to plant. Below it a jay's feather is tied on with a string of beads that click when the door opens. Your aunt said it was for catching the bad dreams that come in August, when the nights don't cool. You told her it was for catching spiders, and she laughed and let you keep it.

This year you take it down before the picking starts and carry it out to the far corner, where the old Bramley stands with its branches propped on crutches. You hang it from a low limb. By dusk a moth has gone into the web and stayed there, its wings pinned in neat grey threads, and you cannot tell whether the moth was caught or the web was finished.

In the morning the feather is turning slowly in the first draught off the orchard, and the moth is gone. You leave the hoop where it is, pick the first crate of Discoveries, and walk back down the rows with the beads chattering behind you.