Fine line black dreamcatcher tattoo with feather fringe on the side of a person's ribs, seen from behind in warm light.

Dreamcatcher tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with long brown hair and a loose brown top pulled off one shoulder, exposing the side of the torso. A small dreamcatcher tattoo sits on the ribcage, with a circular hoop, a web of thin lines, a bead and a few hanging feathers. The linework is thin and dark grey to black, with little or no shading, and the warm, low-light photograph has a soft amber tone.

Fine line Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Web Hoop

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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 lorry ahead has been waved through twice already, and the officer in the glass box keeps glancing at the ring hanging from your rear-view mirror as if it owes him money. It is a small thing: willow bent into a hoop, strung with waxed thread and one blue bead, with three grey feathers that your grandmother said must be left to turn in the draught. You told her they were for keeping off bad sleep. She told you they were for catching what you did not need to carry across a line.

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Officer Pell asks you to step out. The car is searched: a bag of cold chips, a spare tyre, a shoebox of letters tied with ribbon. He lifts the letters, reads the postmark from Hollin Bridge, and frowns at the handwriting, which is hers. You stand in the sodium light and watch the web on the mirror turn slowly, catching nothing but the dark.

He asks what the trinket is for. You could say it is a toy. Instead you tell him about the winter she spent awake in the back room of the post office, counting the vans that never came, and how she made the first one from a hoop that had snapped off a wedding arch. The web is meant to snag the dreams that are too heavy, and let the light ones slip through its small gaps by morning, to whoever is sleeping best.

He waves you on without the letters. Two miles past the barrier you pull into a lay-by, unhook the ring, and hold it up against the sky until the dawn lets you see the holes in the web. Then you sleep with the window down and the feathers ticking against the glass.