Dreamcatcher tattoo across upper back

The net is finished at last, strung across the window of the low house at Skerry Gap, and the swifts came to it before the light went. Three of them, which Mam always said was a good count. You will laugh when I tell you Pell sat up on the sill and watched them like a magistrate, his ears doing that thing they do when he has decided something matters and will not say what.

I made the rings from driftwood the sea gave back after the big flood, then bound the web with copper wire pulled from the old relay posts on the headland. Nobody on the island trusts a dreamcatcher that is only string any more. The sky is full of signal that never stops for weather, and the woman at the ferry swears the web catches what passes through at night and holds it until morning, so the sleeping can hear it properly. I am not sure I believe her. I am sure the net is beautiful.

The three feathers hang from the bottom: one gull, one heron, and one from a kite nobody will admit to flying. Each has a bead at its root, and each bead holds a name I was asked to keep. I tied them in the order you liked, the way you used to line up pebbles by size along the step.

When the swifts left at dawn, one of them had a loose thread of your handwriting caught in its tail, so I know the net works. Come home before the wire rusts. Pell says hello, and so do I.