Black line dreamcatcher with soft blue feathers tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, above denim shorts.

Dreamcatcher and feathers on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a large central hoop and three smaller hoops hangs from the top of the design, with fine black linework forming the webs. Several blue feathers in soft, blended shading trail down and out from the hoops, with a few small loose feathers scattered around them. The tattoo sits on bare skin against a pale, plain background, with the denim shorts cropping the lower frame.

Fine line Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Hoop Web Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoops were already hanging on the nail when Maud came in from the boats, so she knew her mother had been up half the night again. Three small rings and one wide one, strung on tarred twine, their webs so fine that the lamplight went straight through them. Her mother sold them at the Saturday market for a shilling each and said the money was the least of it. A good web, she claimed, caught the dreams that came too loud and kept them from the sleepers in the cottages along Quay Lane, so the men could sleep before the tide turned.

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Maud had never believed a word of it, which was why she was surprised to find the largest hoop missing that evening. She took the spare from under the bench and carried it down to the sea wall, where the gulls were squabbling over a dead mackerel. She held the web up to the dusk and waited, and the first dream that drifted past was her brother's: a ship with its sails full of wind and nobody aboard to haul them in.

She did not catch it. The loose feathers she had knotted at the bottom lifted instead, one blue primary after another, and she watched the first one spin off over the harbour towards the lighthouse, where the lamp had just come on. Her mother stood at the top of the steps when Maud climbed back up, arms folded, looking at the hoop in her daughter's hands.

Neither of them spoke. The next morning there was a new hoop on the nail beside the old ones, larger than the rest, its twine already knotted with a single grey feather.