Pencil sketch of a dreamcatcher with long feathers and a flock of small birds drifting off to the right, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Dreamcatcher with feathers and flying birds

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a dreamcatcher with a looped hanging cord, a rope-edged hoop, a fine web of crossing threads and small bead accents. Three smaller hoops hang below it, each with feathers, and three large feathers fall from the base with fine hatched barbs. A scattered group of small birds in flight trails away to the lower right, and the whole design is drawn in fine black linework on pale paper.

Fine line Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Sketch

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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

Your brother sends the hoop from Winnipeg in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a newspaper his landlady has already read. You unwrap it at the kitchen table in Hallam Row while the kettle goes cold behind you, and the first thing you notice is how light it is. Willow and cord, a web of thread knotted at every crossing, and three smaller hoops hanging from it like children holding their mother's skirt. Feathers dangle from each one, grey and brown, with a few tiny glass beads that catch the window.

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Mrs Pettifer from number nine comes round that afternoon to borrow sugar and stays to look. Her nephew brought one back from the navy, she says, and it hung over his bunk until the damp got into the cord. You should hang it where the morning light hits first, she tells you, so the bad dreams get caught in the web and burn off with the sun. You say you don't believe in that. She says that's all right, the web doesn't mind.

By March the letters from Winnipeg have stopped, and you lie awake listening to the mill whistle and the coal lorries grinding up the hill. Then you start sleeping through until the milk van. The feathers go grey with soot and you dust them with a paintbrush on Sundays, and the web stays whole through every gale that rattles the sash.

On the last Saturday in April you push the window wide. Something stirs along the sill: a scatter of small dark birds, lifting one after another, tipping south over the chimneys and the wet slate roofs. You lean out to watch them go, and for once you don't reach for them.