Colour tattoo of a dreamcatcher with a central paw print and hanging feathers and beads, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with paw print on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher hoop sits at the top of the design, with a dark paw print at its centre and small blue and red dots scattered around it. Three long feathers hang beneath, shaded in grey and black with soft highlights, and are decorated with red and blue beads along the cords. The design is shown on the upper back of a person with the head cropped out of frame, against plain skin.

Back Dreamcatcher Paw print Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signal hoop had been strung on the observation deck since the third winter, when the ship's dogs were still allowed to run the spin ring. Old Tamsin said the paw print at its centre was the first thing she ever wove, and that nobody on Meridian Hold should touch it without asking the dog. We asked Scout. Scout put her nose to the copper rim and sneezed, which Tamsin counted as a yes.

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Each night the feathers shivered as the relay picked up whatever drifted past from the dark: pulses, half-songs, once a voice saying our names in a language nobody spoke any more. Tamsin tied red beads along the cords so we could tell good noise from bad. Blue ones meant the sleepers were restless. Red ones meant somebody was calling home.

The night the feathers stopped moving, I went up alone with a torch and the logbook. Scout came up the ladder one rung at a time, hips complaining, and sat under the hoop with her tail thumping the deck. Nothing came through the relay. I checked the coils, the seals, the beads, all of it, and found nothing wrong, except that she kept staring at the black glass as if someone had promised her a walk.

I sat down beside her and told her what Tamsin had told me: the net catches what is looking for the way home, and sometimes the thing looking is only a tired body that wants to be followed. So I opened the hatch to the outer lock, and Scout went first. Behind us the feathers began to stir, gently, as if a breath had passed through them.