Pencil-style drawing of a dreamcatcher with feathers, ribbons, two roses and butterflies, shaded in purple-grey with a pink and yellow wash, as a tattoo design.

Dreamcatcher with roses and butterflies

Mixed · Flash

A detailed drawing of a dreamcatcher with a web pattern, three hanging feathers and trailing ribbons, with two shaded roses and several butterflies at the lower and upper edges. The linework is fine and the form is built up with soft hatching and smudged shading in purple-grey. The pale paper background carries a warm pink and yellow wash that fades toward the top, and the design is centred on the page.

Dreamcatcher Feather Rose Butterfly Ribbon

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collars up and stop squinting at the sky, because the sky has never once bought a pie. Rain on the Saturday market in Cold Harbour Lane, and old Mrs Tully's stall stood where it always stood, between the eel man and the fellow who sold clocks that ran backwards. She had a dreamcatcher hung from the awning pole, a willow hoop wound with grey thread, its three feathers dripping and its ribbons slapping wet against the canvas.

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Every Saturday a girl called Nell Harker came up the lane with buckets of roses from her grandfather's glasshouse, the petals bruised by the weather but still red at the heart. She'd buy a penny's worth of tea from Tully and ask the same question. What does the web catch? Bad dreams, said Tully, and lets the good ones fall through to whoever needs them. The feathers are for the ones that want to leave. And where do the bad ones go once they're caught? Tully pointed up at the butterflies pinned on the stall's crossbeam. They fly off with the ones that got out too late, she said, and nobody's ever seen them land.

One Saturday Nell didn't come. The roses on the trestle went brown at the edges and Tully sold nothing but pegs. At dusk a butterfly, dark as spilt ink, settled on the hoop and would not be shifted. When Tully finally lifted the catcher down, she found a single rose petal caught in the web and a knot of ribbon tangled among the feathers. She walked to the glasshouse that night. The door stood open, the benches were bare, and a note on the gate said only that Nell had gone to the coast to paint the sea. Tully rehung the catcher. The rain eased, and the butterflies lifted off the gutter, one by one, into the lamplight.