Black and grey fine line dreamcatcher tattoo with feathers and beads running down the centre of a bare back.

Dreamcatchers and feathers down the spine

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two dreamcatchers hang one below the other down the centre of the back, with a beaded cord across the upper shoulders and several feathers hanging from the rings and cords. The linework is fine and detailed, with light shading in the feathers and rings. The photograph is black and white and shows the tattoo as the main subject against a dark background.

Fine line Back Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Cord Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughed twice before the Waltzer caught, and by then Dad had already strung the last of the bulbs along the caravan steps, which was how he said goodnight to a town. I sat on the back step with a tin of glass beads and a ball of waxed cord, threading them the way Nan taught me, one bead, one knot, one bead, because the dreamcatchers sold best when the knots were tight enough to hold a drop of rain.

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We sold them from a trestle beside the candy floss, Mrs Pell calling them sleeping charms and the lads from the rides calling them dream traps, which Mrs Pell said was bad for trade. The feathers came from the pigeons that roosted in the rigging loft. Dad plucked them himself at dawn, grey ones and speckled ones, and I pinned each to a cord with a dab of glue, never two the same, because Nan said a net that caught only one kind of dream caught nothing worth keeping.

The widest hoop I made that last August had eight points in its web and three feathers hanging from the base with a string of blue beads. A woman bought it without haggling and asked me to tie it high in the caravan window where the lamp would shine through the weave. She said she had lost her sister to a fever in a town we had passed years back, and she wanted something hung up to catch whatever came next.

In the morning the web was thick with moths, dozens of them, dead and dusted gold by the bulb. Dad took it down without a word and we moved on before the sun was properly up. I still have the feathers that came loose. Some nights I hang one over my bed, and I dream of nothing at all, which Mrs Pell says is the only proof a dreamcatcher works.