Black ink tattoo of two dreamcatchers with hanging feathers and a branch across the outer thigh, with a hand holding up denim shorts.

Dreamcatchers and feathers on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two dreamcatchers hang one below the other, each with a radiating flower pattern inside a ring, and feathers trail from a branch at the top and from the lower edge of the design. The linework is fine and even, with light tonal shading on the feathers and no colour. The design runs vertically down the thigh, with the top section partly tucked under the edge of the shorts.

Fine line Thigh Dreamcatcher Feather Flower Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had strung her first dreamcatcher from a willow hoop the spring the herring failed, and by autumn she had a dozen of them hanging in the rafters of the net loft at Skerrow. Her nephew Tom climbed the ladder every morning with the tide lamp still lit, complaining that the hoops knocked his head. He did not believe in dreams that could be caught like moths.

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The trouble started in October, when the harbourmaster's boy stopped sleeping. He came up the stairs white as flour and asked for the one with the flower in it, the eight-petalled ring Ada had learned from her mother, who had learned it from a woman across the water whose name nobody remembered. Ada knotted the sinew carefully, looping each crossing so the centre opened like a star, then hung a second ring beneath it on a longer cord. She threaded in feathers from the gulls that fought over the fish guts all summer.

Tom watched her and asked why she needed two rings when one would do. She said the first caught what came in from the dark, and the second let the rest fall through to the sea, where it belonged. He laughed, but he saw the boy's shoulders drop when he took the pair down the lane in the grey light before the boats went out.

In spring the boy came back with the rings rubbed smooth and the willow gone to new leaf. Ada asked how he had slept. He said he had not dreamed at all, and that frightened him more than the nightmares had, so he had hung them over his own bed again. Ada took the spare hoop down from the rafter, the one with no feathers, and turned it in the light so the flower opened and closed like something breathing.