Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with red roses and teal feathers on the side of the ribs, in a traditional style.

Dreamcatcher and roses on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher sits at the centre of the design, its dotted web surrounding a five-petalled pale flower with a red centre. Two red roses with yellow highlights and green leaves frame the top, and a third rose sits lower on the left, while teal and brown feathers hang down with small red and blue beads. The bold black outlines and flat colour fills contrast with the soft grey dotwork shading in the web, and the design follows the curve of the ribs.

Traditional Dotwork Ribs Dreamcatcher Rose Feather Bead Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down, sit down, the chair by the radiator is the warm one. No, the other one, Mrs Okafor has had that cushion since Tuesday. Right. I'm only telling this once, so listen while my chest still lets me.

Keep reading

Carrow House had twenty-two floors and a lift that only trusted itself on the odd ones. On the fourteenth lived a man called Tomasz Vile, who kept red roses in paint tins along his balcony and quarrelled every spring with the pigeons over them. One April the pigeons won. He found a feather on his doormat the size of a hand, teal at the tip and brown at the root, and he could not bring himself to bin it. So he bound it to a hoop cut from an old bicycle wheel, with his late wife's green wool, and hung it in the kitchen window to see what the light would do.

The light did nothing much, but the children came. Every child in the block had a bad dream about the lift, and by summer the hoop had a skin of them, webbed in fine thread, each one with a bead strung through it so you could count. Tomasz said he never looked too closely at what got caught. He only knew that by morning the webbing had gone slack and the beads were warm, the way a pocket goes warm after you've held a stone all day.

When his knees gave out he gave the hoop to Ruby from the eleventh floor, who was eight and needed it less than anyone. She hung it in the stairwell where the bulb has been dead since 1998. The feathers knock together when the draught comes up the stairs, and if you stand still you can hear them clicking the bad things out. Last week the longest teal feather let go and spun past the landing window into the car park, where some child will find it and keep it.