Pen and watercolour style design of a dreamcatcher with peacock feathers, blue dots and flowers on the hoop, drawn on paper in a fine line botanical style.

Dreamcatcher with peacock feathers and flowers

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A dreamcatcher design with a webbed centre and a hoop lettered with the quote "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today". Two peacock feathers with green and orange eyes hang on either side, and a large blue and purple feather hangs from the centre, with clusters of flowers at the top right of the hoop. The linework is fine and black, with the feathers shaded in blue, teal and purple, and small blue dots set along the web.

Fine line Botanical Dreamcatcher Feather Peacock feather Flower Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud keeps the twine shop at the top of Scarrow Quay, where gulls sit on the chimney pots and the door is left on the latch until the tide turns. On your first morning she hands you a needle and a heap of grey net that smells of diesel and old fish, and points at the corner where the mesh has gone. You work until your fingers blister. Above the counter a dreamcatcher turns in the draught from the door, its hoop lettered in fine black script and hung with peacock feathers that flash green and orange whenever the sun slides under the cloud.

Keep reading

Read it, she says, when she catches you staring. Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today. She taps the net with her thimble. Half of that is easy. Anyone can dream. The other half is knots, and the sea doesn't care for dreamers who can't tie a bowline in the dark.

You stay through three winters. You learn to read a torn mesh the way other people read weather, and you learn that the little blue beads sewn along the web are not decoration. Each one marks a night Maud went out past the breakwater with the boats and came back in before light, cold to the bone, and sat down to mend whatever the sea had taken. She never told you which night was which. She only said there were more of them than she'd admit.

When she dies in the spring, the shop goes to you with the thimble, the ledger and the dreamcatcher, still turning. A boy comes in one morning with a net torn clean through, asking if you can have it fixed by the evening tide. You pull up a stool, thread the needle, and tell him to watch the corner. Behind you the feathers catch the light, and you tie the first knot without looking.