Black and grey tattoo of three dreamcatchers with trailing feathers on the side of a torso, above the waistband of denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatchers and feathers on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large dreamcatcher with a web pattern above three smaller dreamcatchers linked by thin lines, with several feathers hanging and drifting from the design. The feathers are shaded with soft grey gradients and fine hatched detail, while the hoops and webbing use crisp black linework. The image has a reddish tint across the whole photograph, and the ink itself reads as black and grey on the side of the body.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Web Hoop Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, because the wind's up and the sea's been crying all night, and I won't tell this with a draught at my back. You'll have heard the boarding house on Scarrow Front had a hoop hung in the upstairs window, the big one with the spider-thread web, and three little ones strung off it like grapes off a stalk. Mr Haddow put it there the summer the herring boats stopped coming in.

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He was a joiner who'd lost his nerve on a ladder, and he couldn't sleep, so he made the thing from willow he cut out of the hedge behind the chapel. Every morning he'd check the webbing for anything snagged. Gulls' feathers mostly, grey as wet slate, and once a brown one off a pheasant that nobody could account for. He said the big web was for catching bad dreams and the small hoops were for the ones that slipped through.

Then his Ada went out on the Tuesday tide to fetch her sister from the ferry and never came back in. After that the feathers began to drift off the hoops in the dark, one at a time, and settle on the front step as if someone was leaving a trail. Haddow swept them up every dawn and never once found the web holding anything at all. He said that was the trouble with catching dreams: you only ever catch the ones you can bear to keep.

Here's the bit you came for. Last winter a lodger's girl asked why we kept the thing up when it caught nothing. I took her to the window and showed her the step. A feather lay there, fresh and dry in the salt wind, and it was pointing inland, towards the hills, not out at the sea. Go on, pick it up. That's how you know it's still working.