Black linework dreamcatcher with blue shaded feathers running down the side ribs of a person in light-wash jeans.

Dreamcatcher and feathers on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a large outer hoop and three smaller hoops hangs from the upper side of the ribs, with a black web pattern and dangling black lines. Blue feathers in soft gradient shading trail down and to the left from the hoops, with a few small outlined feathers scattered around them. The tattoo is shown in colour against pale skin, with the subject's torso cropped at the face and the hips and jeans visible below.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Hoop Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

'Don't you touch that hoop, Edie. It's been up since the winter the Maud was three days overdue, and it isn't finished yet.' Mrs Pargeter wiped her hands on her apron and kept her eyes on the window, where the wind was pushing gulls sideways over the bay. 'Sit on the stool. You'll hear it properly if you're quiet.'

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Three rings, I made it with, from the driftwood that came up in the shingle after the storm. The big ring for the bed, the three little ones for the corners, so the bad dreams get caught in the middle like flies in a web. My husband, Tom, laughed at me. Said the sea doesn't need catching. But he was out in the Maud every night that winter, and I was up every night with the string and the knots, and I wove every line tight enough to hold a nightmare.'

She reached up and touched the feathers hanging from the lowest ring. They were gull feathers, dyed the blue of the water off the point, and they turned slowly in the draught from the door. 'The gulls were the only callers at the back step that winter. I left them bread and they left me a feather. Forty-one I counted, and I kept the ones blue at the tips, because blue is what you want when you're waiting for a boat.'

The lodger at the end of the landing started coming down for his tea at six, and that spring, when the Maud came round the point on a morning that smelt of tar and rain, Tom was standing at the rail with his cap in his hand. Mrs Pargeter never told anyone about those nights. She just left the hoop where it was, over the bed in the front room, and the feathers kept turning long after the sea had gone quiet.