Watercolour-style dreamcatcher tattoo with fine black linework and pink, teal and green washes on the upper arm.

Watercolour dreamcatcher on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a circular hoop, fine black webbing, beads and hanging feathers covers the upper arm and reaches toward the shoulder. The linework is thin and precise, while the feathers and hoop are filled with soft, bleeding washes of pink, purple, teal, green and yellow. Loose splatters and faint script on the skin around the design add to the painterly composition.

Fine line Upper arm Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Hoop Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass was shut again by the time Mother Ilse sent me up with the wagon, so I walked the last mile in snow to my knees, carrying a hoop of willow under each arm like a pair of cartwheels. Nobody on the far side of the Haltenkar bought from a girl who arrived late, but the innkeeper at Sankt Brun had a daughter who wouldn't sleep, and she had paid in advance with a jar of blue ink.

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Ilse had taught me the knots in the spring. Fine black thread, pulled tight from the centre out, never through the same hole twice, or the dreams go round in circles and come back sour. I had strung eleven by the time the first thaw came, and I'd kept a feather from every bird I could catch: the grey ones from the scree, the jay's blue ones from the lower woods, the long brown primaries of the buzzard that died in the chimney. Ilse dipped each feather in the ink pots before I tied it, so the colour bled into the quill like weather coming over a hill.

The girl at the inn was sitting on the stairs when I came in, hair still damp from the bath. She took the catcher from me, turned it over, and held the hoop up against the lamp. Through the webbing, the light broke into pink and teal across the wall. "It's not sleeping I want," she said. "I want to know what I'm dreaming about."

I told her the web keeps the frightening ones tangled, and lets the rest fall through to the feathers, where the colours settle. She looked at me for a long time and then asked whether a thing that catches nightmares ever catches the good ones by mistake. I had no answer then, and have none now. I left the catcher on the nail above her bed, the hoop turning slowly in the draught, and when I walked down in the morning the pass was open and the snow had gone to rain.