Black and grey dreamcatcher and feather tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a navel piercing and jeans visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and feather on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a circular hoop, fine web and beaded drops hangs above a curling feather with smaller beads along its length. The linework is clean and the feather is shaded in soft grey tones with darker accents. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with a patterned top and jeans at the edges of the frame.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Web Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the Humber that October with teeth in it, and by eleven the whole Michaelmas fair had shuttered except for Dorrie's stall, where a bare bulb swung on its flex and the hoops knocked together like bones in a bag. I was sixteen and paid in cider and hot dogs to sit on the crate and keep the feathers from blowing away.

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Dorrie made her catchers from willow she cut at the river bend and webbed with waxed linen, one strand at a time, so slowly that she said a single hoop took a week of Sundays. The feathers came from a pigeon man in Goole who kept birds on his allotment. She would hold each one up to the bulb and turn it, grey at the root and darker towards the tip, and say a feather was only honest when you could see the light through the shadow.

When the generator coughed and died she sat down beside me and told me what the catchers were for. Bad dreams snag in the web, she said, and the morning light burns them off like dew. I asked what happened to the ones that got through. She threaded a small dark glass bead onto a loose end of linen and pressed it into my palm. That one, she said, is for the dreams that came to say goodbye.

The fair rolled south to Doncaster before dawn, and Dorrie's hoops went to a scrapyard in Hull years ago. I still have one feather, and when my window is open it turns on its thread, grey at the root, catching whatever light the street has to give it.