Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with feathers, beads, a small elephant and a yellow butterfly on the inner forearm, in a realistic style.

Dreamcatcher with feathers on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven grey web sits on the inner forearm, with a yellow butterfly perched on its upper right rim. Below the hoop hang feathers in blue, purple and grey, strands of red and turquoise beads, a braided section and a small grey elephant. The shading is soft and detailed, with the web drawn in fine dark lines and the feathers rendered with graded colour.

Realism Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Butterfly Elephant Web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The queen of Hollin Vale had not slept properly since the river froze, and so on the third night of the thaw she sent for the net-maker, a widow named Orla Penhallow who lived above the eel shed and smelled of tar and cedar smoke. Orla arrived with a willow hoop under one arm and a basket of grey thread across her hip. She did not ask why she had been summoned. She only looked at the queen's bed, at the pale window, and said that dreams came in through the holes in a web the way moths came through a torn screen, so the holes had to be made small enough to stop the bad ones and wide enough for the good.

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The work took her until dawn. She knotted the thread from the hoop's rim inward, star after star, each line crossing the next at a sharp angle, until the centre was a tight grey sun no wider than a thumbnail. Then she hung the feathers, one blue jay, one heron-grey, one pale violet from a pigeon the miller's boy had brought her in a sack. She threaded red and turquoise beads down the strings, and at the bottom, where the queen's own maid had once tied a braid of her mother's hair, she tied a small pewter elephant the palace goldsmith had cast for a child who never came. Last of all a yellow butterfly, cut from a scrap of silk, was pinned to the rim where the light would catch it.

The queen woke at noon to find the window open and a single grey feather on her pillow. The butterfly had moved in the night, Orla said, and would move again when there was something worth carrying out. When the queen asked what the net had caught, Orla only nodded at the centre star, which was empty, and at the sunlight pooling there like water in a cup.