Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with yellow and orange petals around the hoop and rainbow feathers, on the upper thigh.

Dreamcatcher with sunflower petals on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A dreamcatcher sits at the top of the design, with a black-outlined hoop, a fine web of lines and a ring of yellow, orange and red petal shapes around it. Three feathers hang below, banded in green, yellow, orange and red with white tips. The colour ink is bright and dominant, with shading added to the feathers and petals, and the design is centred on the upper thigh.

Thigh Dreamcatcher Sunflower Feather Hoop Web Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at the Kessel checkpoint has asked twice what the hoop is for, and twice you have told him it catches dreams, which is true enough if he does not ask whose. It turns on its cord from the van's mirror, three feathers in green, orange and red swinging together, and every pothole on the road up from the valley knocks them into a little counting rhythm.

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Aunt Mira made it the spring before the road closed. She wove the web from waxed thread around a bicycle wheel she had pulled from a ditch, then painted the petals onto the rim one by one, yellow at the centre going to rust at the edge, because she said a sunflower was the only flower that always turned to where the light had been. She sold small ones at the Sunday market on the far side of the river. You were the one who carried the big one out when the bridge was shut to everyone but lorries, and you have been carrying it ever since.

The guard hands back your passport and then asks, quite politely, to see inside the hoop. You lean out and let him hold it up. The low sun comes through the web and throws a wheel of gold across his cap and the tarmac, and for a moment the petals look like they are opening in the heat. He does not say anything for a while. Then he sets the hoop back on the mirror with two fingers, the way you would settle a sleeping child.

"Sunflowers don't usually travel well," he says.

"They have to," you tell him. "Otherwise there's nothing to turn towards."

He lifts the barrier. As you pull away, the small wheel of light slides along the road beside the van, keeping pace with you until the bend takes it.