Black ink dreamcatcher tattoo with a mandala centre across the upper back of a woman standing in water, with a partial design on her shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, standing chest-deep in turquoise water with her wet hair pinned up. A large black dreamcatcher design sits between the shoulder blades, with a mandala-style centre and hanging strands ending in small feather or bead shapes. A partial design with fine curved lines is visible on the shoulder to the left of the frame, and the image is mostly soft blue-green tones from the water.

Blackwork Back Shoulder Dreamcatcher Mandala Feather Back tattoo Water Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ask any of the old women on Cross Row how the dreamcatcher came to hang above the Pryce boy's bed, and they will tell you it was the wrong way round from the start. Nobody asked the sea for it. It came in a tin trunk on the Tuesday train, wrapped in a Chronicle, sent up from a cousin in Penzance who had married a sailor and gone to live where the sun was a rumour and the waves never stopped.

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Dai Pryce hung it himself, on a nail driven into the lime wash, because his wife said a boy who had been down the Deep Seam twice before his twelfth birthday needed something to catch what came in the night. The ring was willow, bent by hand and bound with blue thread, and the web inside was knotted so tight a moth could not have crossed it. From the base hung seven strands, each ending in a bead of black glass, and the bead at the foot of the middle one was shaped like a small feather that never stopped swinging.

Every night the boy counted the strands before sleep. Seven, the same as the old shift names chalked on the lamp room door. Some nights he swore one had gone missing, and his mother swore she had seen the web tremble when the cage clattered up at four. The nightmares, she said, were not caught so much as sorted, the way the screener in the lamp room sorted lumps from slack, and only the ones with weight in them came down.

That is all the old women know, and they are not agreed on the ending. Some say the boy grew up, went down the shaft at twenty and came up every evening for forty years dreaming of nothing at all. Others say the nail is still in the wall, the web still holds, and the glass feather still turns when the wind comes off the reservoir and across the empty rows.