Black fine-line dreamcatcher tattoo with hanging feathers on the side of a person's ribs, seen from behind in warm light.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher tattoo on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black dreamcatcher tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with a circular hoop, a radiating web of lines and two thin hanging feathers. The linework is light and sketchy, and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The subject is shown from behind in warm, low light, with long hair, a loose grey top and denim shorts framing the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Web Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum soaked the willow in the kettle water until it gave, then bent it round into a hoop the width of a dinner plate. The canal had iced over at Braunston and the Mary Ellen would not move until the thaw, so we had the long dark evenings and nothing to do with our hands but knot. I asked whose feathers they were. She said the heron that stood on our roof every morning had lost three in a fight, and I could believe that or not.

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She laced the web from the rim inward, eight spokes and a spiral, pulling each knot tight with her teeth. The lines were sinew from a butcher in Rugby. Dad came in from the towpath with frost in his beard and watched without speaking, then fetched the lamp so she could see the centre better. Mum said a catcher only worked if the knots were close enough that the bad dreams had to climb through them one at a time, and she never once said which dreams were bad.

When the thaw came, she hung it above the bunk where I slept, and I lay under it for weeks counting the gaps. In April the boat went down to Oxford with coal, and somewhere below the lock at Iffley Dad took a bad fall off the gate. He lived. Mum did not cry in front of me. She unhooked the catcher, sat with it on the cabin table, and picked out one feather, the longest, and tied it to the bottom of the hoop with a loop of red thread.

The feather still moves when the boat does, though the sinew has gone brittle and one spoke is missing. I keep it over my own bunk now. Each morning I check the web for gaps, and each morning I find the knot she tied last, small enough that nothing gets through it.