Small dreamcatcher tattoo with a black ring and two blue and purple feathers on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small dreamcatcher tattoo on the side

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small dreamcatcher design sits on the side of the torso, with a solid black ring at the top and two long hanging feathers. The feathers are shaded in blue and purple tones, while the ring is filled in black. The shot is taken outdoors, with a grey top and long hair in the foreground and a blurred cafe setting behind.

Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Ring Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is low and the wind off the salt flats has teeth tonight. You want the tale of Oriel Marsh, who mended nets for the fishing villages of Hallow Reach, a kingdom no mapmaker ever managed to pin down because the fog kept rolling it off the page.

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Oriel made a small ring of green willow and bound it round with black thread, pulled so tight it rang like a bell when flicked with a fingernail. Each morning she hung it from the eaves of the chandler's shop, and whatever bad dreams had crept into the village overnight caught in its weave like gulls in a seine net. For the feathers she waded out to the reed beds and took two from the herons who did not mind her, then dyed them in woad and bramble juice, blue at the tip and fading to violet near the quill. Dreams, she said, go bruised before they go out.

The harbourmaster's boy, Tobin, had started dreaming of the sea coming up the lanes and carrying off the bakery, and by midwinter he had stopped sleeping at all. Oriel took the ring down and sat with him on the step until the bells for dawn. She noticed then what the net had been doing all along. It held onto everything tangled in it, and the boy's fear had knotted itself so thickly that the boy could not rest. So she unpicked three knots with her teeth and let the rest slip through the centre, the way water goes through a sieve.

If you walk to Hallow Reach now, you will find the ring still hanging from the chandler's eaves, its black thread gone the colour of ash. The feathers still turn in the wind off the flats, blue and violet, and the children run under them without looking up. Nobody keeps the bad dreams in it any more. They drift through the middle and out over the marsh, and the village sleeps.