Pencil sketch of a dreamcatcher with a solid black paw print at its centre and striped feathers hanging below, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with paw print design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woven dreamcatcher hoop with beads, threaded lines and three striped feathers hanging from its base. A large solid black paw print with four toe pads sits in the centre of the hoop. The linework is fine and detailed with soft pencil shading, shown in black and grey on a pale background.

Dreamcatcher Paw print Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Reach had seen the paw since the river took the lower road, so when Ada Wren came up the causeway with a willow hoop under one arm and a sack of striped feathers under the other, the ferryman asked her what she meant to catch.

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"Whatever is walking at night," she said. "My father kept a grey cat for the grain sheds. It went out in the flood, and it has been coming back to the step every night since, and I cannot see it in the dark."

She wove the hoop on the step with the lamp at her feet. She bound the rim with cord the colour of old rope and strung threads across the open middle like spokes of a wheel that had forgotten its hub. Bead by bead she knotted in small pale stones. At the bottom she tied three feathers, banded grey and brown, and let them hang loose so the wind could read them.

On the seventh night she hung it above the sill and sat inside with the door open. The ferryman's boy came to watch from the wall, and swore afterwards that the threads hummed when the mist came in off the marsh. Something pressed black on the moonlit flags below the hoop: four toe pads and a heel, each one soft as wet slate. It did not climb. It sat until the grey came up, and then it was only a print in the damp stone.

Ada never said what she had hoped for. She swept the step each morning and found the print again each morning, a little deeper in the stone, until the sweeping stopped and she let the hoop hang where it was.