Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with pink flowers, green leaves and hanging feathers on the side of a thigh.

Dreamcatcher with flowers on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven web, a central bead and hanging feathers, topped by pink and red flowers with green leaves. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading in the feathers and petals. The design sits on the outer thigh and is framed by a grey top and a light towel, with the subject's hands at the top of the frame.

Thigh Dreamcatcher Flower Feather Bead Gem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the ladder in the Pelham orchard before six, the grass still silver with dew, hooking a bramble hoop over the lowest limb of the old Bramley. Your sister Wren calls from the gate that the wasps are already at the windfalls. You tell her to hold the ladder. She doesn't, so you climb with the hoop in your teeth and a ball of waxed thread looped on your wrist.

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Grandmother taught you the web, a pattern of double loops, each knot pulled tight so nothing bigger than a gnat gets through. You tie a red glass bead at the centre, the one she kept in her button tin. Feathers hang from the rim: two rook quills, a grey pigeon's, and a long pale one from the peacock nobody else would claim. You stitch a ring of pressed red blooms and green leaves around the edge with wool, their petals gone the colour of old brick.

Wren says it won't keep the wasps off the cider press. You say it was never for wasps. Grandmother said a dreamcatcher lets the good dreams through the net and holds back the rest, and that it must hang where the wind comes, not where you stand. Up the valley the wind arrives, turns the feathers, and the bead knocks the bark with a sound like a spoon against a cup.

By noon the dew has burned off the web and nothing is caught in it but light. Wren has gone in to the kitchen, and the wasps have found the windfalls after all. You leave the feathers turning in the wind and walk down the rows without looking back, which is the only way Grandmother ever told you to leave a dream.