Black dreamcatcher tattoo with a mandala centre and hanging feathers on a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher tattoo on the upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black dreamcatcher with an ornate mandala centre and a ring of fine dotted detail sits on the upper arm and shoulder, with four feathers and beaded strands hanging below. The linework is dark and fairly fine, with dense shading inside the feathers and around the circular frame. The photograph is in warm, low-key lighting against a pale background, and the subject's face is cropped out of the frame.

Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Dreamcatcher Mandala Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't touch the middle of it, love, the thread's still wet. Mr Pascoe always wanted the knot on the inside, and I told him a knot on the inside is a knot that comes undone in the dark. He never listened. Sit where the lamp can reach you, and I'll tell you about the summer the sea gave back its dreams.

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The hoop was ash, from the fence the gale took down in fifty-three. I bent it into a ring, bound it with waxed linen, and wove the web across it in eight spokes, then a spiral, then a ring of tiny shell beads I'd picked off the Porthkidney sand. The feathers hung from the bottom: two gull, one cormorant, and one grey feather nobody could name, though we all had guesses. I sold them outside the chapel for a shilling. The fishermen's wives hung them over the beds where their husbands slept, and the men swore they slept better than they had since the war.

Then Jack Trevena's boat didn't come in on the Tuesday. Mary Ann Penhale came to the cottage with flour still on her hands, asking for the best one, the one with the mandala centre, because her boy was out past the headland with nobody to fetch him. I had only one left, the one I'd been keeping for myself. I gave it to her. She hung it over her door, and I walked home with my hands empty and my pockets full of sand.

The boat came in on the Thursday, rowed the last mile by the lifeboat with the tide behind her. That night I lay in my bed with nothing over it and dreamed of nothing at all, only the sound of the net-shed door. In the morning Mary Ann brought the hoop back up the lane. The web was whole, and the beads were still on it, and the feathers hadn't moved. "Nothing came through it all night," she said, "except the moon." Pass me that spool, love. There's a girl in the lane whose father is still at sea, and she has had bad dreams since the spring.