Black and grey tattoo of a dreamcatcher with two feathers, birds and the word Dream in script, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Dreamcatcher and feathers on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a web of fine lines hangs from two shaded feathers, with a trail of small birds flying off to the lower left. The word Dream is written in a flowing script beside the dreamcatcher hoop. The work is entirely black and grey, using fine linework for the web and soft shading for the feathers against a light skin tone, photographed in a warm sepia tone.

Lettering Realism Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Script Dream

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, you're letting the draught in. Ray kept racing pigeons on the top row of the allotment sheds for thirty-one years, and every one of them had a name chalked on its leg ring. Dorothy was the grey hen. Old Sam was the cock with the torn tail. When the day came for the loft to go, your grandad stood on the bank in his good coat and counted them out loud, the way he counted shifts.

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The birds went first, lifting off the tin roof in a loose scatter, thin as pencil marks against the slag heap. We watched them drop low over the chapel and bend west towards the moor. Ray said they'd come back for the seed, they always did. They never did. Only one feather came down, a grey primary, and it landed on the step of the new bungalow the council had promised us, as if somebody wanted us to know where they'd gone.

That winter I hung Ray's old dreamcatcher over the bed, a willow hoop he'd bent himself, its web knotted with blue thread from my sewing tin. Two feathers dangled from it on lengths of string, long and dark. I told myself it was for the nightmares, the ones about the coal face that never quite left him. Mostly it caught the lamplight and nothing else.

Then in March a letter came from Hexham. Dorothy had hatched a chick in a spare box, a grey one with a torn tail, and the lad who wrote had ringed it with the name Ray chose for the bird he loved best. I read it twice at the table. Then I unpicked the first knot of that web, and I let the feathers go out of the window to find them.