Black and grey dreamcatcher tattoo with a deer skull and antlers at the centre, hanging feathers below, on a person's thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with deer skull on the thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher sits inside a rope-edged hoop, with a deer skull and antlers at its centre and a radiating star-like web behind them. Three feathers hang from the base of the hoop, shaded with fine grey tones and soft highlights. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black ink and greys, and it is framed by a blurred indoor background with a grey knit jumper and dark shorts.

Realism Geometric Thigh Dreamcatcher Antler Feather Web Hoop Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Haddow kept the stag's skull in a flour sack at the back of her shed, three winters after her husband brought it home from the edge of Larch Wood. She would not burn it and she would not sell it. Instead she sat me on an upturned bucket each Sunday and taught me to bend green willow into rings, binding them with sinew until the hoop held its shape like a held breath.

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The rope went round the outside, twisted tight, and inside it she strung a web of thread across the gap, knotting each crossing so it made a star. 'A dream has to get through the middle,' she said, 'and the middle is where the bad ones get snagged.' When the frame was finished she set the skull in the centre, antlers spread wide, and tied three grey feathers to the bottom, the longest one lifting in a draught from the open door.

That autumn my brother Tom stopped sleeping. He walked the lanes at night and came back with mud to his knees and a look I did not like. I hung the hoop above his bed without telling anyone, and the next morning the thread at the centre was pulled loose, one knot undone, a single tuft of grey fur caught in the loop as though something had pushed through to see him.

Mrs Haddow took one look at the broken knot and laughed, which frightened me more than anything. 'Good,' she said. 'It went looking for him and found the web instead. Now he'll dream of the wood without having to walk in it.' Tom slept through until noon that Sunday. I have kept the hoop above my own bed ever since, mending one knot each year and leaving the gap where the stag used to be.