Black and grey dreamcatcher tattoo with an ornate mandala top and three shaded feathers across the upper back, in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and feathers on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, with the head turned away from the camera. The tattoo shows an ornate mandala-style top with a dreamcatcher-like web of fine lines, a small diamond-shaped motif, and four shaded feathers hanging below. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled dotwork and soft shading in the feathers.

Fine line Dotwork Back Dreamcatcher Feather Mandala Diamond Ornament

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and leave the band to its own noise. Mr Halloran's clarinet has never once kept time, and I'm not going to compete with it. Now. The net above the stage at the Pavilion, the one with the feathers gone grey at the tips, was hung there by a woman called Nell Ashdown the winter the ballroom flooded. She made it from a hoop of willow and a spool of black thread, and she knotted it so fine you could barely see the joins.

Keep reading

Nell wasn't after pretty. She wanted the bad dreams caught before they reached the sleepers in the rooms above the chip shop. So every night she sat up with her needle and her lamp, and every dream that came through the window she pulled into the web, one knot at a time. The feathers she took from the gulls that nested on the pier, four of them, long and dark as wet slate. They hung from the bottom of the net where the heaviest dreams settled, and there they'd stay, she said, until the dreams were worn smooth enough to be ordinary.

Then came the spring the little brass diamond turned up at the centre of the web. Nobody knew where it had come from. Nell swore it was a dream of her own that had got stuck and wouldn't go, so she stitched it in place and left it. Years on, when her hands had gone and the net came down to the Pavilion for the Saturday dances, a boy with a bad leg stood beneath it and asked the girl by the urn to dance. She said yes. Nobody in this room needs to know more than that about the diamond.

Go on, Mr Halloran, play something slow. And mind the feathers when you dance, they've been known to drop on people who aren't paying attention.