Black and grey Botanical and Realism tattoo of a dreamcatcher with sunflowers and hanging feathers on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and sunflowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher sits on the inner forearm, its circular hoop filled with a fine web of interlaced lines and small diamond-shaped beads. Sunflowers with shaded petals and centres sit at the top right of the hoop, and three feathers hang from its base. The work uses fine linework with soft grey shading for depth, and the plain dark background keeps the tattoo as the focus.

Botanical Realism Forearm Dreamcatcher Sunflower Feather Web Bead Circle

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp. Now, in the kingdom of Harrowmere, which never appeared on any map because the mapmakers kept losing it, there lived a net-maker called Ysolde Pell, and her hands were never still. Her webs hung above every cradle in the realm, circles of pale willow bent to a hoop and strung with threads so fine that bad dreams snagged in them like flies in a spider's larder. Each night she knelt by the window and tied tiny glass beads where the threads crossed, so nothing black could slip the knots. Beyond her cottage, the queen's sunflowers stood taller than a man, and every morning their great faces turned to follow the sun across the sky. Ysolde thought that a sensible way to spend a life.

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One winter the thread ran short. The prince's cradle went bare, and that night a dream came through the gap, not a frightening one but a grey, quiet dream of a sea she had never seen, with gulls and a rope creaking against a wooden hull. She sat up beside the cradle until dawn, watching the grey dream drift in and out of the open weave. Then she understood. Her net had been catching everything, the grey dreams with the black, and a child who never dreamed of the sea would grow up with no tide in him at all.

So she left one knot loose on purpose, and she tied the last bead with a single thread, and she went home to sleep for the first time in years.

And that is why, if you look up at the hoop above your bed tonight, you will find one thread hanging free. Do not tie it. Go to sleep.