Colour tattoo of three dreamcatchers with turquoise, brown and purple feathers on the side of the torso, shaded to look realistic.

Dreamcatchers and turquoise feathers on the side

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Three black-outlined dreamcatchers hang from a diagonal cord, each with a fine web pattern and small turquoise beads. Feathers in turquoise, brown and purple trail down from the dreamcatchers, with soft shading along their edges and highlights along their quills. The tattoo sits on bare skin above denim jeans, with a patterned top visible at the upper edge of the frame.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Web Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come in close, you at the back, and mind the candyfloss, it's sticky and it won't keep your dreams any tidier. Three rings on one cord, see? Hazel bent by hand in a barn near Harrogate, every web strung tight with sinew thread by a woman who never once let it sag. The turquoise beads aren't for show. They're stops, so the good dreams know where to rest.

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Now, the boy. Tom Halloran, nine years old, came down the hill from the dodgems one wet October with his cap on backwards and a plan. He'd lost his grandad's pocket watch on the ghost train, and he wanted it back by morning, so he paid his tuppence and asked me to hang the biggest ring over his bed. I told him the webs don't catch what you ask for. They catch what you're carrying.

Nobody believes that at nine. So I gave him feathers to tie on the cord, one blue, one brown, one plum-coloured from a jay that flew into the big top and didn't know it was a fair. I sent him home with the rings. Next morning he came back with no watch, but a gap in his teeth where he'd lost one on the Waltzer, and he hadn't cried once about it.

The watch turned up in the lost property tent the Thursday after, tangled in a dead man's bootlace, which is another story and one I'll tell you for a penny. Some things the web keeps. Some things it lets fall. Feathers always fall. That's what they're for.