Black and grey realism tattoo of a dreamcatcher with trailing feathers and beads on the left side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and feathers on a rib

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven web, beads and a dark centre sits at the top of the design, with three shaded feathers and curling wisps hanging below it. The linework is fine and the feathers are rendered with soft grey shading and highlights to give depth. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and is framed against bare skin on the side of the torso, with a patterned top and a navel piercing visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Mercy Ann had a dreamcatcher hung over her cabin door when Harold Wint bought her at Stourport, and he never once took it down, though the boatmen laughed at him for it. A web of waxed thread on a ring of willow, with dark beads strung below and three grey feathers that turned in the wind off the water. Harold said his mother had made it, and that was the end of the talk.

Keep reading

On the long pound between Worcester and Diglis, in the year the river flooded the towpath, a boy named Peter Hale came aboard to work the lock gates for a shilling a day. He slept in the forecastle with the knock of the hull and the hiss of the weir, and every night he dreamed of drowning in the black cut under the bridge. Harold listened to this for a week without saying anything. Then he climbed up on the roof and lifted the ring from its nail.

Every bad dream, Harold told him, is a thing too heavy to float, so it catches in the web and stays there until morning, when the sun burns it away. The good ones are light. They slip through the holes and run down the feathers like rain down a reed, and they settle on the sleeper's chest. Peter asked how Harold knew. Harold said he had hung it over a sleeping boy once before, and that boy had grown up and gone to sea.

The next morning Peter was gone too, with his shilling left on the coal box. The ring was still on its nail, and every feather had been turned to face the sun.