Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with green feathers and purple flowers running down a person's side ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with feathers on the side ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large dreamcatcher sits at the top of the design, with a bigger hoop above three smaller hoops of finely drawn radiating webs. Green feathers and purple flower buds hang from the lower hoops, with dark swirling stems at the base. The black linework is bold and clean, with green and purple shading on the feathers and flowers, and the design wraps across the flank of the torso.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Flower Leaf Web Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had come down in Margate the week the bank took the lorries, and Mr Dalby sent me up the rigging with a bag of tarred twine and orders to mend whatever the wind had found. I was nineteen and had never been higher than the ferris wheel. The net was the last thing at Dalby's Grand Continental Circus that still worked properly, a hundred feet of hemp knotted into rings, and it had caught every fall for thirty years without once being asked to.

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I started at the centre, where the old knots had gone grey. Each hoop of the web spreads from a single eye, like spokes from a hub, and lose the eye and the whole thing sags. Ines, the flyer and Mr Dalby's daughter, watched from the caravan step with a cup of tea going cold in her hands. She said her father once caught a girl from forty feet up in that same net, and the girl walked away and married the lion tamer. Ines did not say whether that was a good ending.

Where the net met the guy ropes, the cord had frayed into loose strands. I wove them into small tassels and dyed them with elderberries Ines had boiled for jam, then tied on green gull feathers the boys had gathered off the pier. It was foolishness. Nobody in the seats would see them. But the tent would be sold by autumn, the net cut into lengths for the scrap man, and I wanted something unnecessary left in the knots.

On the last night the tent stood empty except for us. Ines climbed up, lay back on the sagging web with her arms spread, and let it take her weight. I stood below and counted the rings to her shoulders. When she came down she had purple fingertips and a grin, and said the net never remembers who fell into it, only who was caught.