Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an anchor with a dreamcatcher, a feather and the word dreamer in script.

Anchor, dreamcatcher and feather design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an anchor with a dreamcatcher hung from its ring and a feather wrapped around its shank, with the word dreamer written in script beneath. The linework is fine and sketchy, with hatched shading on the feather and the anchor's shank and a lighter touch on the dreamcatcher web. The image is monochrome on cream paper, with a teal pen lying across the top right corner.

Anchor Dreamcatcher Feather Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, Derek, you are making the bunting nervous. Right. Everyone here has heard about my brother Alf, who could not sit through a hymn without standing up to check the tide. What you have not heard is how he came home from the Dogger Bank in 1952 with one boot, a bad temper and a feather tied round the shank of his old grapnel anchor.

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The feather belonged to a girl called Mari Pryce, who sold trinkets from a barrow on Scarborough harbour wall. She had a hoop of willow webbed over with string, and she told Alf it would catch the bad nights the way a net catches herring. He laughed at her. Said he had never had a bad night in his life. She said that was exactly why she was giving it to him, so he would have something to hold when the nights came calling, and she pressed the feather into his palm before he could argue.

He hung the hoop from the ring of that anchor and went back out on the Lively Sarah, and the anchor came off the boat and onto the mantelpiece of our mam's front room, where it stayed. Alf never came back from the autumn run. The feather did, rolled up in a wet oilskin with a card tucked in it that read dreamer in Mari's looping hand. She never once spoke of it to anyone. She married a joiner from Filey and raised three daughters who all sang at weddings.

So lift your glass to the one who kept that hoop full of dust for sixty years, and to Mari, who was right about the nights. Some of them she caught for him. Now, Derek, you may sit down, and Auntie Vi may have her trifle.