Black and grey dreamcatcher with shaded feathers and turquoise beads, with swallows, tattooed along the ribs of a bare torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher and swallows on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a circular web, shaded feathers hanging below and turquoise beads along the strands is tattooed down the side of the ribs. Several dark swallows sit above and below the main design. The feathers use soft grey shading and the web is drawn in fine dark linework, while the beads and some small details add teal accents. The design runs diagonally down the side of the torso, with the raised arm visible at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Swallow Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the rain has got into the stall again, so I'm writing this on an upturned crate under the awning of the fishmonger's, where the gulls have finally stopped bothering me. Nobody buys dreamcatchers in February when the sky is the colour of wet slate. Mr Okafor from the leather stall says we should sell umbrellas instead, and I'm beginning to think he's right.

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Yesterday a pair of swallows came in under the market roof, the ones that nest in the iron girders above the fruit sellers. One of them landed on the rim of the big web I'd hung from the pole, right on the wooden hoop, and sat there while the water ran off the canvas. It turned its dark head this way and that, picking at the teal beads on the strands as if they were berries. I didn't have the heart to shoo it off.

The woman who bought the large one last spring came back this morning. She didn't want a refund. She wanted to know whether the web would hold, because she'd hung it above her bed in Hartlepool and had dreamt, she said, of nothing but rain for a month. I told her the knots were sound. I didn't tell her I'd been awake half the night counting them.

I've kept the grey feather the swallow dropped on my crate. It's the colour of the street, and I'm enclosing it, so you can tuck it into your coat pocket and think of me when the wind comes off the river. Come home soon. The stall misses you, and so do the birds.