Black and grey tattoo of two stacked dreamcatchers with trailing feathers on the side of the ribs, with small script reading memento mori and memento vivere below.

Stacked dreamcatchers and feathers on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two dreamcatchers hang one above the other, each with a woven ring, a star-like web and beaded details, with shaded feathers trailing down from them. The linework is fine and the feathers use soft grey shading to create depth, set against the curve of the ribs. Small black script reading memento mori and memento vivere sits below the feathers on the left.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Feather Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell kept the boarding house at the top of Gullet Lane, where the wind came up off the harbour wall and rattled the sash windows all night. Every October she hung two willow hoops above the front door, each bound with sinew and trailing a few grey feathers from its base. Guests asked about them and she told them the same thing every year: the house had always had them, and nobody had ever needed to take them down.

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The winter the herring failed, a lodger named Tobias Fenn came up the steps with a cough and a sea-chest full of unanswered letters. He slept badly. Each night he woke with salt in his mouth and the sound of a bell that was not there. Mrs Pell climbed the stepladder, unhooked the upper ring, picked loose one knot and laid it on his pillow. "Your sleep is a net," she said, "and you have been letting the bad things through the holes." He laughed at her, but he slept until noon for the first time in a year.

In spring he sailed for Lisbon on a cargo boat and sent back one postcard, a church with a painted skull over its gate. On the back he had written in pencil: memento mori. Mrs Pell pinned it beside the kitchen door. A week later a second card came, in a hand she did not know, with the other half written underneath. Remember you must die. Remember you must live. She never learned who had written it, but she kept both cards pinned there.

Each October she still hangs the two hoops, and the feathers catch the draught from the back stairs. When the door opens in a gale they knock softly against the wall, like someone outside asking to be let in.