Realistic dreamcatcher with pink roses, grey shaded feathers and script lettering tattooed across a person's back.

Dreamcatcher and roses across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a dreamcatcher with a fine web pattern, framed by three pink-red roses at the top and trailing shaded feathers below. A handwritten script quote runs diagonally beside the feathers, and small dots and stars scatter through the design. The feathers and dreamcatcher are in soft black and grey shading, while the roses carry the only colour, and the photograph is taken from directly behind the subject.

Realism Back Dreamcatcher Rose Feather Script Quote Star Web Bead

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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

The lamp wants winding at two, and you are the only soul on the rock awake to do it. Nine flights of cold iron stairs above the store room, and the wind has found every gap in the glazing, so each landing hums a note lower than the last. Your hands smell of paraffin and wet brass. Out on the gallery rail a gull's feather has snagged, grey at the tip and dark as a bruise at the root, turning slowly each time the beam sweeps past.

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Under the logbook, pinned flat by a limpet shell, is the card Ada left last summer, when the supply boat was late and the relief keeper lay sick with fever in the back room. Her handwriting slanted uphill in brown ink: Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. You thought it sentimental then. Tonight it reads like instructions for a man who has been counting the hours between ships.

The roses in the tubs by the door are Ada's too. She carried them out in a tin bucket on the last crossing and the salt has been at them ever since, but three heads still open on the step each morning. In the chair by the stove you doze in your boots and dream of a ring of driftwood strung with sea glass, a web of fine spokes catching whatever drifts past in the dark, the stars caught in it like dust on a sill.

At five the light goes grey, and you find the feather has worked loose from the rail. It drops past the window, turning, and you watch it settle onto the black water and ride out past the rock, the first thing this island has let go of in a week.