Black and grey pen drawing of a dreamcatcher with a radiating web, wrapped hoops, dangling feathers and a flock of birds, suited as a tattoo design.

Dreamcatcher with feathers and birds

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of two stacked dreamcatcher hoops, each with a radiating web of fine looping lines, wrapped in shaded bands. Several feathers hang from cords beneath the hoops, and a small flock of birds flies off towards the lower right. The shading is built from fine hatched and stippled strokes in grey and black on a plain pale background, with the composition running vertically down the page.

Fine line Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Web Hoop

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ardgour had hung the two hoops above the byre door the spring her husband's boat failed to come home, and she told the girl sent over from the mainland to help with the lambs that the web was for catching whatever a house did not need at night. Ailsa, who was fifteen and had not yet learnt to keep her opinions in her pockets, asked what that might be. The old woman went on knotting twine and said, 'Mostly weather, and the things people say on the pier.'

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Each morning the fine lines of the upper hoop held a skin of salt dew, and by noon it had dried into a pattern like a flower that had been folded too many times. The lower ring, bound tight with grey cord, took the smaller catches: a dropped name, a quota that would never come, the sound of a door closing in a house three islands away. Ailsa thought it was nonsense, until she found a scrap of her mother's handwriting caught in the bottom loops, soft as a moth, and she stood on the step for a long time without going in.

On the last evening of the lambing, the feathers swung and the gulls on the skerry went quiet. Mrs Ardgour unhooked the lower ring and held it out over the wall. 'Everything caught here gets its turn to leave,' she said. At first light the birds rose from the wet stones in a loose, shifting flock and went south-east over the sound, the scrap of paper riding among them, until nothing was left on the line but the feathers, turning slowly in the wind and asking for nothing at all.