Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with black feathers, green beads and two pink roses on the thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and pink roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black-lined dreamcatcher with a woven web, green beads and dangling black and grey feathers. Two pink roses sit at the upper right and lower left of the ring. The linework is bold, and the colour is saturated against plain skin with soft shading on the feathers.

Neo-trad Thigh Dreamcatcher Rose Feather Bead Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the Pearmain trees have started dropping their fruit onto the grass faster than you can gather it, and you have stopped pretending the wasps are not winning. Your uncle Tom has hung a dreamcatcher from the nail above the cider house door, a ring of black-lacquered willow with a web of waxed thread, and he says it keeps bad dreams away from the pickers sleeping in the loft. You suspect it mostly catches moths.

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The roses along the wall are pink and blown open, their petals going papery at the edges. Every evening you cut two for the kitchen table, and every morning one has been dropped back on the step. Tom says it is the wind. You know it is Delia from the farm below, who has been pacing the orchard with a borrowed measuring chain and who wants the land for the new bypass, and who has been leaving cigarette ends in your tin of spare twine.

On the Thursday the web snags something stiff and pale: a folded letter from the council, weighted with a green glass bead that has come loose from the ring. You read it standing in wet grass with a bushel basket against your hip. The hearing was three weeks ago. Tom has known the date all along and has said nothing.

You carry the basket up to the cider house and hang the dreamcatcher back on its nail before supper, turned so the web faces the road. Then you go out with a torch to see whether the old Pearmain at the top of the slope is still standing. The beads on the ring knock against each other all night in the wind, like someone counting.