Colour tattoo of dreamcatchers with mandala centres and feathers in pink, purple, green and teal on the side of a torso, above the waistband of jeans.

Dreamcatchers and feathers on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several dreamcatchers joined by beads and dangling feathers, with a large pink and orange mandala at the top. Two peacock-style feathers in teal, green and purple hang lower down, with a pink ribbon curling beside them. The linework is dark and the feathers are shaded to show curve and depth, against lighter skin.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Mandala Feather Peacock feather Bead Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peacock had been screaming at the wind since the autumn fair, and Mrs Odile Penhallow said the wind was to blame, not the bird. She kept her allotment behind the chapel wall in Stithians, where the runner beans climbed their canes like ladders and the sea could be heard but never seen. Each spring she hung a new catcher from the old apple tree, a ring of pale willow bent into a wheel and bound with waxed thread, then strung with red glass beads from a jar her husband had brought back from Penzance.

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The Greaves boy came over the wall one June morning to steal plums and stayed to watch her work. Tam was nine and wanted to know what the catchers caught. Odile told him the bad dreams, the cold drafts, and the things people said at funerals that were better left in the churchyard. He asked about the feathers. She had found three in the hedge where the peacock moulted, and she tied the two greenest to the lowest ring with a length of pink ribbon cut from the hat she had worn at her wedding. The third, with an eye like a bruise, she kept in her apron pocket for reasons she did not explain.

That night the wind came hard off the bay and rattled every window in the village. In the morning Odile found the apple tree full of small white things, the torn pages of a letter Tam's mother had been writing to a sister in Canada, caught in the beads and turning slowly in the light. The boy stood at the wall with his cap in his hands, unsure whether he was in trouble. Odile picked the pages out one by one, smoothed them against her knee, and handed them over without a word. Then she unpicked the ribbon from the feathers and tied it round his wrist in a neat bow, the way you would mark a field for planting.