Black and grey pencil drawing of a dreamcatcher with a mandala-style web, beaded strands and three feathers, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Dreamcatcher with feathers drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A dreamcatcher hoop holds a mandala-style web with a swirled centre, and beaded strands and three feathers hang below it. The feathers are finely hatched with soft grey shading, while the hoop has denser dark shading. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain pale background, with no skin or body part visible.

Dreamcatcher Feather Mandala Web Bead Swirl

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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

You have been mending the same net since the boats came in at four, and your fingers know the knots better than they know your own name. Mairead Doyle's boy has carried the last of the mackerel up the slip in a tin bucket, and the gulls are already working the quay. You tie off a mesh, bite the twine, and think of the hoop your father hung over the bed in the back room, a ring of ash wood strung with sinew, the web inside so fine that only lamplight caught it.

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Your father said a web like that snared the bad dreams and let the good ones slip through to the sleeper. You never believed him. You believed in herring prices and the set of the tide off the Rattray bank. But the night the Kittiwake went out and did not come back, you sat up with the spare net across your knees and found your hands working the old pattern without asking you, a spiral from the centre outwards, each strand drawn tight, then eased, the way he taught you when you were small enough to sit on his boot.

The wind swung west before dawn, and the Kittiwake came in low on the water with her sail patched and two men at the tiller who lifted their hands as if nothing had happened. Their catch was thin. Nobody on the quay said so. You walked down the slip with the net over your shoulder and felt something light tap against your neck, and when you shook the mesh out on the shingle, a grey gull feather had worked its way into a loop near the middle and held there, quivering in the sea air.

You leave it caught. Tonight you will hang the net on the nail by the door, feather still in its hole, and go to bed with the window open so the sound of the boats can find you.