Tree of life dreamcatcher tattoo on the side of the ribs, with shaded grey feathers and teal and purple beads.

Tree of life dreamcatcher on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a tree of life inside its hoop hangs from the top of the design, with three shaded feathers and strands below. The hoop and tree are in dark teal linework with solid fills, while the feathers use soft grey and brown shading. Small teal and purple beads sit along the strands, and the design is photographed on the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Dreamcatcher Tree of life Feather Bead Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit where I can see you, because this is the part your mother never tells properly. It was the summer of nineteen fifty-three, and the fair had come to Hallam Fold with its swings and its tin-pot brass band. Your grandad bought me a hoop no bigger than a side plate from a stall run by a widow called Ada Frere. I thought it was a fancy for a girl with nothing to hang on her wall.

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Ada would not let me touch the web until I had washed my hands in the water bucket behind her caravan. She had woven the netting tight as a drum skin, and in the middle of it she had worked a tree in dark thread, roots and all, so the branches sat inside the hoop like they were growing there. She said the tree was there to remind the net where it had come from. Then she strung the feathers, grey and brown, from a pigeon the rector's boy had brought her for a penny, and she threaded two teal beads and two purple ones on every strand, the purple ones cut from your great-aunt's old necklace.

That winter the mill closed for a month and your grandad came home quiet every night. I hung the thing above our bed, and I lay awake listening to the feathers knock softly against the iron frame. I told myself it was only draughts coming under the door. Still, I slept, and I kept sleeping, and by the spring your grandad was whistling on the stairs again.

So that's the whole of it. I can't tell you what it caught, only that nothing came through it that we didn't want. Now pass me that tin, love, and let's see if the kettle has boiled.