Drawing of a dreamcatcher with green and purple butterfly wings and small silhouetted butterflies on a yellow and pink background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with butterfly wings

Colour · Flash

A dreamcatcher hangs from a loop at the top, with a woven web at its centre, beaded strands and dark feathers below. Two large butterfly wings with green and purple shading spread from either side, with smaller black butterflies and curling swirl lines around them. The ink is applied with soft, sketchy shading over a mottled yellow and pink wash, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Dreamcatcher Butterfly Feather Web Bead Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the dreamcatcher at the bottom of a tea chest in your aunt's loft, wrapped in a pillowcase that smells of mothballs and cold cigarettes. It is meant to hang above the top table at Maureen's wedding on Saturday, the one she has been running since spring with a clipboard and a grim kind of joy. The hoop has a crack where someone once sat on it. The web inside has faded to the colour of weak tea, and the feathers are so dark they look damp.

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Saturday arrives hot and thundery. The marquee sits on the hill behind the Ferry Inn, and the vicar has been asked twice not to mention the weather. You hang the hoop from the rafter hook with fishing line, climb down from the stepladder, and notice the wish cards. Guests were told to write one hope for the couple and tuck it into the beads. Most are tucked. One has slipped loose and is turning slowly on its thread, and when you step closer you see the small black butterflies on the linen have begun to lift, one by one, like sparks off a bonfire.

Your nan always said a dreamcatcher snags the bad dreams and lets the good ones slide through to the sleeper by morning. You pick up the loose card. Someone has written, in a careful hand, Let him be as patient in the tenth year as he is in the first. It is signed by a woman whose name you do not recognise, which is how you know it is the right one.

By the time the speeches start, the web is empty. The feathers hang straight and quiet, the way they should. You look up expecting the grey tent canvas to show through the mesh, and instead you see the butterflies gathered at the crown of the hoop, wings open, green where the lamplight catches them. Then the flap lifts in the evening wind and they go out under it together, into the car park, and nobody else seems to notice.