Colourful dreamcatcher tattoo with purple, blue and pink washes and feather tails, sitting on the upper back below the neck.

Dreamcatcher with watercolour washes on upper back

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A dreamcatcher with a circular web, a small hanging ornament above and several feather tails below is shown on the upper back. The design uses black linework with loose purple, blue and pink washes that bleed outside the outlines, giving a splashed, painterly effect. The tattoo is centred on a plain background of smooth skin, with the top of the neck and shoulders visible.

Back Dreamcatcher Feather Mandala Swirl Ink splatter

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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

Ysolde had strung the hoop from a salvaged bicycle wheel, lacing the spokes with cord unpicked from the old sail store, and every night she hung it above the seed vault where the air hummed loudest. The crew called it superstition. She called it a filter with better manners. Nobody argued with her on the ring, because the seedlings grew faster when it was up.

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Her pigments came from the algae tanks, a violet that caught at the back of the throat and a blue like the inside of a mussel shell. When condensation gathered on the ceiling it ran down the web and bled past every line she had drawn, so the thing never stayed as tidy as the sketch she'd made on the back of a manifest. She had stopped trying to correct it. The bleed is where the dreams get in, her grandmother used to say, and her grandmother had been wrong about most things and right about that.

The relay pinged on a Tuesday, which meant nothing up here, and a voice came through the grille asking for Hollis Vane, a man dead for forty years whose name was still stencilled on the cargo hatch he used to fix. Ysolde sat on the floor with the bicycle wheel in her lap and listened to the static between the words. The feathers below the web were not feathers at all but strips of reclaimed film, and they clicked softly whenever the air moved. She counted them, eleven, then twelve, then gave up.

In the morning she hung the net back above the vault, still damp with the night's ink. A pale pink thread ran from the lowest feather down to the deck plate, and she left it there, because someone was going to have to follow it.