Black ink pen drawing of a dreamcatcher with a large feather hanging below it and small birds flying off to the right, drawn on a pale background.

Dreamcatcher with feather and birds design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a dreamcatcher with a woven web, smaller hoops hanging from the sides and base, and beaded strands. A large feather hangs from the lower hoop, and a flock of small birds rises from its right edge. The fine, hatched linework is in black ink on a cream background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Web Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plums were coming down faster than we could pick them, so Dad strung the old wire hoop from the lowest bough of the Victoria tree and said it would keep the wasps off. It didn't. It did catch the light, though, a wheel of grey thread with a feather knotted at its base that turned whenever the wind came over the wall from the lane.

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Late August, the orchard smelled of fermenting windfalls and the wasps were drunk on them. I was nineteen and home for three weeks between jobs, and I spent most afternoons under that hoop with a biro, doing sums on the backs of seed catalogues. Dad would come out with two mugs of tea, look up at the web for a long minute, and say nothing about it, which was how he said most things.

The morning he agreed to sell the top field, a flock of starlings lifted off the wire and poured over the house in one long ribbon. The feather worked loose from its knot and drifted down past my shoulder, then snagged on a bramble by the wall. I climbed over to get it, tore my sleeve on the wire, and came back holding a quill gone soft at the tip.

I still have it, pressed between the pages of the atlas on the shelf above my desk. Dad never asked for it back. Every year in late August I carry that atlas out to the orchard, and something rises from the long grass before I reach the gate, as if the trees are still keeping count of who has stayed and who has gone.