Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with pink roses, grey feathers and blue beads across the upper arm and shoulder, in a realistic style.

Dreamcatcher and roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven web, grey feathers and blue beaded strands hangs beside three pink roses with dark green leaves. The web is drawn in fine black lines, while the rings, feathers and roses are shaded with soft tonal gradients for a three-dimensional look. Pink and blue ink dominate against the grey and black shading, and the design wraps over the shoulder and down the upper arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Dreamcatcher Rose Feather 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

Hold still, the lot of you, and stop pawing at the sugar bowl, because this is the bit where I tell it properly. Ray Dunmore danced with the same girl every Saturday from the spring of 1951, under the big glass globe at the Starlight Pavilion in Hastings. She always came in with a pink rose pinned at her collar, pale as a boiled sweet, and he always forgot the foxtrot the moment she looked up at him.

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He was no hand at talking, so he made her a thing instead. He bent a hoop of wet willow in his mother's kitchen, wound it round with fine black thread until it looked like a spider had spent a week on it, and hung grey feathers off the bottom from a pigeon loft on Tackleway. For the beads he used blue glass that a sailor had sold him off a stall in Valparaiso for two shillings and a lie about its age. Then he hung the lot above her bed in the flat over the chemist's on Queen's Road, and told her it would catch whatever she didn't want to keep.

She slept under it for forty years, and I'll tell you what it caught. Every bad dream went straight into those threads and stuck there like flies on paper. The night she dreamt the Pavilion had no music, the web held it. The night the roof came down in her dream, it held that too. But one dream slipped through the gap at the top, a small one, the sort that only wants a dance, and it came down the stairs of that flat and out into the street, and nobody has ever caught it since. Ray used to say that was the only one he wanted to keep.

So when the last waltz plays and the floor gets swept, mind where you put your feet, because that little dream is still down there in the cracks, humming the foxtrot to anyone who'll listen.