Colourful watercolour-style dreamcatcher tattoo with flowers, feathers and the word Dreamer on the side of a thigh.

Watercolour dreamcatcher on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a central star-like web, a ring of fine linework and the script word Dreamer sits on the outer thigh. Loose watercolour washes in pink, green, blue and purple surround the hoop, with blossoms at the top and feathers hanging below, one with a peacock-style eye. Colour is dominant, and the washes fade softly into the skin around the design.

Thigh Dreamcatcher Feather Flower Script Peacock feather Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot wanted a web for the margin of the Psalter, a ring of thread stretched across a hoop of willow that would catch the light the way the hoop in the Bishop's gift had caught it. Brother Anselm cut the willow from the river meadow himself. I mixed the washes: pink from madder, green from verdigris, and blue from the indigo I had been grinding since Lauds until my knuckles were stained the colour of a bruise.

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The hoop was easy. The feathers were not. Anselm, who had kept the scriptorium for thirty years and had never once painted a bird, said a feather must be drawn from the tip inward, the way a man counts his sins, so that the eye would be the last thing to close. I did not understand him until I painted the eye on the lowest plume, a single round of ochre and blue, and the light from the high window caught it so that it seemed to look back at me.

That night I dreamed the web had grown past the page and out through the shutters, catching the grey dawn in small beads of water. Anselm stood in the doorway with a lamp and said my name the way he said the psalms, slowly and without hurry, and asked what I had seen. I told him the truth: a ring full of other men's sleep, and me sitting in the middle of it, awake.

In the morning he had scraped away the word I had lettered beneath the hoop in gold, DREAMER, and in its place he had written it in plain black ink. "A dreamer is a man who sleeps where he is told," he said. "Paint what you were given." He went out to the meadow with his knife and his cloak. I stayed to finish the feathers, and I did not darken the eye, though I knew he would have wanted it dark.