Black linework drawing of a dreamcatcher with three hanging feathers and a quote lettered around the hoop, shown as a flash design.

Dreamcatcher with feathers and quote

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A fine black linework drawing of a dreamcatcher with a compass-style star and a circular web at its centre, with three feathers hanging from the base. Quote lettering curves around the top of the hoop, reading "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there". The design is drawn in black ink with no shading, on pale paper photographed at an angle.

Fine line Dreamcatcher Feather Compass Mandala Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table had a cracked corner, and Dennis Ruddock kept his palm flat on it while the Saint Brannock rolled through the swell off Flamborough. Fog had come down an hour after the nets went over, thick as wet wool, and the skipper had gone below to argue with the radio.

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Above the binnacle hung the thing his sister had sent him from Hull the spring he first went to sea: a willow hoop wound with thread, a web strung across its middle, three grey feathers knotted on with fishing line. Every visit she asked whether it kept the nightmares off. He had always said it kept the gulls off the wheelhouse glass. Now it turned slowly as the boat leaned, and the feathers swung the way the needle on the compass card never would. Someone had pinned a scrap of paper beneath it years back, a line of biro capitals nobody admitted to writing: IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING, ANY ROAD WILL TAKE YOU THERE. Dennis had read it a hundred times and taken it for a jibe at the skipper. Tonight he read it as an instruction.

He took a bearing off the star printed on the card, counted the seconds between the Flamborough horn and the hiss of water under the bow, and put the wheel four degrees to starboard. The skipper came up the ladder swearing, saw the heading, and said nothing. Twenty minutes later the fog tore open along the cliffs, and the harbour wall stood grey and close, exactly where a sensible man would have aimed.

They landed the catch at first light. Before he went home Dennis took a fresh grey feather from the deck locker and tied it onto his sister's hoop, and the boat creaked against the quay as if she too were glad to be tied up.