Black and grey line drawing of a dreamcatcher with flowers on the hoop, feathers hanging below and small birds flying off to the left, shown as a tattoo design.

Dreamcatcher with flowers and feathers

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a dreamcatcher with a woven web, beaded hoop, and several flowers clustered around the rim. Five or six feathers hang from the base, with stippled and hatched shading on the feathers and a spiral pattern on the largest one. A flock of small birds flies away to the left, and the design sits on a plain white background.

Fine line Botanical Dreamcatcher Flower Feather Bird Web Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Tarrant could tell a drunk man's knot from a sober one, and the net Ada Lund dropped on her bench that Saturday was tied by someone who had never once been in a hurry. It was a round frame of ash, bound with tarred twine and strung in spokes so fine they caught the lamplight. Hung in the middle by a single black thread was a grey feather as long as a girl's forearm, its tip curled into a spiral like a rolled-up chart.

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"Found it on the mudflats past the sluice," Ada said. "Every bird that came through the reeds at dusk left a bit of itself behind. Gulls, mostly. Some I didn't know."

Nell turned the frame over. Dried clover was pressed into the rim, pale purple gone the colour of weak tea, and the beads along the hoop had been counted by someone who meant to keep count. Seven, eight, and one gap where a splinter of bone had been threaded in its place.

"Who makes a thing like this?"

"Nobody living," Ada said. "My grandmother said it was a snare for bad dreams, so the good ones could fall through to the sleeper. I said that was nonsense. She said I'd see."

That night Nell cut the twine that held the feather and stood at the window. Across the water the sky over the refinery was the colour of a bruise, and a flock came low over the reeds, hundreds of small dark birds turning as one body before peeling off westward in a thin ribbon. She opened the casement and let the frame go. For a moment the feather hung in the wind, and then the birds took it, every one of them, into the dark.