Black and grey fine line tattoo of two dreamcatchers with hanging feathers running down the centre of a bare back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatchers and feathers down the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two dreamcatchers hung one below the other along the spine, with a string of beads across the upper back and feathers trailing from each hoop. The linework is fine and dark, with the feathers shaded in grey to give them depth. The image is monochrome and the composition is centred on the back, with the head and face cropped out of frame.

Fine line Back Dreamcatcher Feather Bead String Spine

Find an artist for this

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

The snow had come in sideways overnight and buried the gate to the lower field, so Dad and I dug the ewes out by hand before the light came up. Gran's dreamcatchers still hung in the lambing shed where she had put them forty winters back, one above the feed bin and one over the pen where the weak lambs went. Nobody had taken them down. Dad said it was bad luck to move them.

Keep reading

I was twelve the winter she showed me how to bind the willow. She bent the hoops green around a bucket and left them to dry on the Aga rail for a week. Then came the sinew, the dyed bone beads from a stall in Hexham, and the feathers. Every feather had to come from a bird that had died on the farm, she said, a wood pigeon or a crow or once a barn owl, so nothing was taken that wasn't already gone. She tied the knots tight, then looser, then tight again. "The web catches the bad dreams," she said, "and the holes let the good ones through."

This morning the top hoop had sagged on its string, and a small spider had already strung a fresh web across its open middle. Dad wanted to sweep it away. I stopped him, lifted the hoop down carefully with the grey feathers trailing against the frost on the window, and turned it over. On the back of the willow, in her small hand, was a tag: For whoever needs the ones I couldn't keep.

We hung it back above the pen, spider and all. By noon the snow had stopped and the low sun came across the field, lighting every beaded thread, and for once the ewes stood quiet beneath it.