Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with hanging feathers and beads on the upper back, set against orange and blue watercolour splashes.

Dreamcatcher with feathers on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a woven web, a thick ring, beaded ornaments and two shaded feathers hanging from its base. The linework is dark and defined, and the feathers use soft grey shading for depth. Orange, yellow and blue washes behind the design give a loose, painterly backdrop, and the piece is centred on the upper back below the neck.

Back Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Web Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane mended nets in Scarrow Haven for forty winters, and when her son Tam sailed for the herring grounds without saying goodbye properly, she sat up with the driftwood hoop her father had left her. She wound it with tarred twine, the same thread that stitched the nets, until the ring was thick as a wrist and the centre was a web no wider than a dinner plate.

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Each night she knotted the web outward from the middle, sixteen spokes, the way her mother had taught her to set a mesh so the water could pass through but nothing worth keeping would escape. Into the bottom she strung jet beads, black as wet slate, and from them hung two gull feathers she had picked off the harbour wall, one grey as the tide-line, one dark at the tip where the gulls fought over scraps.

The village said the thing was a charm. The minister said it was heathen nonsense, and the chandler's wife said it was a fine piece of work for a woman with no husband to speak of. Hester said nothing. She hung it on the nail above the door, and every evening she washed the window glass until the light came through orange and then blue, the colours of the sky over the mouth of the bay, and she counted the spokes.

In March the boat came in on a Tuesday with nine men aboard, and Tam was the last off the gunwale. He walked up the shingle with his cap in his hand and stopped under the doorway, looking up at the web turning slow in the draught. Hester saw him touch one bead with his thumb. "You caught something," he said. "Only the wind," she said, and she swept the step, and she did not tell him the web had kept back every bad dream he would have had at sea.