Pencil drawing of a dreamcatcher with feathers, ribbons, two roses and three butterflies, shaded in purple and pink tones, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with roses and butterflies

Colour · Flash

A pencil sketch of a dreamcatcher with a large web at the top, a smaller hoop below it, and feathers and ribbons hanging from both. Two roses sit at the lower left and a larger butterfly at the lower right, with smaller butterflies near the top. The linework is soft and hatched, with purple shading and a pink wash behind the roses on a pale background.

Dreamcatcher Feather Ribbon Rose Butterfly

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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

You find the dreamcatcher wedged behind the lamp housing on the third morning after the gale, its ribbons gone grey with salt and its feathers pressed flat against the glass. Nobody on the rock admits to hanging it there. Your father says the wind did it. Your mother says nothing, which is how you know she did.

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All that summer the butterflies came up the gallery stairs in ones and twos, drawn by the lamp the way moths are, though these were larger and lazier and had no business being out over the water. You counted them on the rail with a pencil stub in the margin of the logbook. Four by July. Two more when the roses on the cottage wall finally opened, pink at the edges and browning where the spray reached them.

The web had a hole in it the size of a thumb. You asked your mother what it was for. She said it was meant to catch the bad dreams and let the good ones slide through the middle, the way your grandmother had explained it, and that you should keep it out of the wind. You didn't ask why she kept hanging it back up.

On the night the Halvorsen boat failed to come round the headland, you climbed the stairs with the lamp turned low and the web pulled taut against the sky. A pale wing settled on the ribbon beside your hand. You stayed until the light went grey over the water, and the net held nothing but salt and one bright feather. By morning the boat was tied up at the harbour wall, its crew asleep in the wheelhouse, and the butterfly had gone.