Black and grey dreamcatcher tattoos with feathers on an upper arm, and dark lace-style ornamental tattoo on the forearm, with the person's face not shown.

Dreamcatchers and lace tattoos on arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two stacked dreamcatchers with fine circular webbing and feathers hang down the upper arm, drawn in black linework with soft grey shading. Below the elbow on the forearm, a dense lace-like ornamental design in black wraps across the skin. The photo shows a woman in a black bra top and briefs in a kitchen, with her face out of frame and her hair covering the view.

Upper arm Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Lace Ornament Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace came off the Leavers frame in lengths as long as a street, and Nell Shepherd's job in the finishing shed was to pick out every flaw before the cloth went south. Her gran, Ada, said the worst flaws were the ones you could not see. A bad night got into the thread if you let it, and then it showed up in the pattern like a knot in wood.

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So Ada taught her the old trick. You took a hoop of ash that had split in the frame, wound it with cream cotton, and wove a web across it, ring inside ring, tight as a spider's first work. Feathers came last. Nell tied on two pale grey ones from the pigeon loft behind the chapel, one a little longer than the other, and hung the hoops from a nail above the bed of the boy next door, who had not slept through a night since the mill closed and his father took the bus to Sheffield and never came back.

The first night the lower hoop went grey at the edges, as if it had drunk ink. Nell took it down and held it to the window. The threads had caught something dark and fine, like soot, and it had gathered in the knots where the circles met. She did not know what it was, only that it had come out of the boy and was now sitting in her hands.

By Thursday the web was clean again. Ada turned the hoop over with her thumb, nodded once, and went back to the frame. Nell hung it up again, and when she came in the next morning the boy was asleep on the bench by the shed door with his mouth open, and the lace on the cloth lay white and flawless under the lamp.