Black and grey dreamcatcher tattoo with shaded feathers and three flowers on the forearm, in a realism style.

Dreamcatcher and flowers on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a fine-lined circular web, beaded details and a decorative central ornament hangs from the arm, with three shaded flowers at the upper right. The feathers are rendered with soft grey shading and dark accents, giving them depth, while the web and outline are crisp black linework. The ink is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the arm fills most of the frame over a textured background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Flower Bead Web

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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

Mrs Hollis kept the wireless on the windowsill and a hoop of willow in her lap, and every evening she bent it into a ring and strung it with black thread until the spokes looked like the ribs of a parasol. The street called it her rag-and-bone work, though there was no rag in it. Her son Tom had come home from Korea with a cough he never shook off, and he slept badly, so she made him one.

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She used what the hedgerows gave her. Pheasant feathers from the gamekeeper's cottage, a jackdaw's grey wing that a boy traded her for a penny, and glass beads from a jar her mother had carried from Hull. Every bead went along the rim, where the web met the willow. She sewed a small brass fitting at the centre, the one thing bought, from the market stall on Thursdays, and she would not say what it was for.

On the night the church bell cracked in the frost, Tom sat up in bed and asked whether the ring had caught anything. She told him it had caught the bad ones, the ones with the wet hands, and that the good dreams went through the middle and down to the flowers she had painted on the back of the door. He laughed at that, the first laugh in months, and the cough held off until morning.

Years later the willow had gone brown and the feathers had gone to dust, but the beads still hung on a nail above the door, and every time the door opened they caught the light from the lane.