Is it possible to take a filesystem image and write it to a device to take up the space of the drive

Is it possible to take a filesystem image and write it to a device to take up the space of the drive

Essentially what I want to do is create an image of a filesystem then write that filesystem to a flash drive. Currently I am trying to create an hfs filesystem in the form of a file on an ext3 filesystem. I am then using dd if=image of=/dev/sdb1. I then plug the drive into my mac and it tells me that it cannot repair the partition.