Black and grey dreamcatcher with shaded feathers and a cursive quote reading Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today, tattooed on the side of the ribs.

Dreamcatcher and quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a dreamcatcher with a large outer hoop, a web pattern and two smaller hoops, with three shaded feathers hanging from the lower edge. A cursive script quote sits above it, reading Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. The linework is crisp and the feathers use soft grey shading, and the design runs diagonally along the side of the torso.

Lettering Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Script Quote Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets had to be mended by Saturday, so you sat on the harbour wall with a needle in your teeth and a hank of tarred twine across your knees, while your mother read the weather off the gulls and swore at them for getting it wrong. Pinned inside the lid of the Bovril tin on the dresser was a card your father had brought back from Hull, the words copied out in copperplate by a clerk who had never once been to sea: Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. You had read it so often the ink had gone soft at the corners.

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That night you split a length of ash from the hedge behind the chapel and bent it into a hoop, the way Mr Ashby had shown you with the cooper's wire. You wove the webbing with what was left of the twine, knotting it tight at every crossing so the sea-fog would have nowhere to go. Two smaller rings came from a broken lobster pot, and three grey feathers from the jackdaw that lived in the chapel roof, which you had waited a month to find on the path. You hung the whole thing from a nail above your bed, and the feathers turned slowly in the draught from the window.

Your mother stood in the doorway with the lamp and said that catching dreams was for fishermen's wives who had nothing else to catch, and that you would be wanting a sensible coat for the train. You said nothing. In the morning the ticket was already in your pocket, and the platform at Whitby smelled of coal smoke and salt.

The smallest hoop stayed on the nail. When the light came through the window it threw the web's shadow across the whitewashed wall, a pattern like a net laid out to dry, and one thread still held a knot from the old harbour.