Black and grey photograph of a small dreamcatcher tattoo with three feathers and loose drifting feathers on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small dreamcatcher sits on the inner forearm, with a circular hoop, a fine radiating web and a central dot. Three solid black feathers hang from the base of the hoop, with two smaller feathers drifting beneath them. The photograph is black and white, with soft light falling across the skin and a blurred textured surface behind the arm.

Blackwork Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Web Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy had been mending nets on the quay since before the war, and she never let the boys see her hands shake when the gulls came down on the drying lines. Her needle went in and out, in and out, each knot pulled tight as a clock's teeth. The net she was making now was no use for herring. It was a small round thing, the size of a saucer, and she bent a willow rod into a hoop and drew the cord across it the way her mother had shown her: eight spokes, then sixteen, then a web so fine the lamplight from the lighthouse went straight through.

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Her grandson Tom came round the coal shed with a ragged jay's wing in his fist and asked what it was for. She said it was for keeping bad dreams off the bed. He looked at the web, then at the wing, and said it wouldn't catch anything, the holes were too big. She said that was the trick of it. The good things were small enough to pass through, and the rest stayed caught in the knots until morning.

She tied three grey gull feathers to the bottom of the hoop, their quills knotted hard, and two smaller ones she left loose so they could drift. Tom watched her with his chin on the wall. When she asked him what he dreamed about, he said boats, and a man with a lantern who walked on the water, and once a fox that played cards. She laughed and told him the fox was a liar.

That night she hung the hoop from the nail above his bed. In the morning the window was open and the small feathers had gone, one caught on the rail and one lost somewhere over the harbour wall. Tom said he'd slept through the whole night and dreamed of nothing at all. Mrs Abernethy looked at the web, which still held its dark centre, and went down to the quay with her needle.