Dreamcatcher tattoo with flower of life circles, watercolour splashes and the words dreams unwind, love's a state of mind, on an upper arm.

Dreamcatcher with script on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A dreamcatcher with a flower of life motif at its centre and another below, hung with beads and feathers, sits beneath a line of script reading dreams unwind, love's a state of mind. The linework is fine and dark, with soft pink, blue and purple watercolour-style washes behind the design. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a red table and brick wall in the background.

Fine line Geometric Upper arm Dreamcatcher Flower of life Feather Bead Script Quote Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the back rooms above the fish market on Sallow Lane, a widow called Maud Ferris strung willow hoops for the people who could not sleep. She charged a penny a hoop and asked only that they bring back the thread when their dreams had run out. Nobody on the lane knew where she had learned the craft. Every hoop hung in a window with a small brass wheel at its centre, six petals worked into the metal, the same mark her mother had scratched on the lintel of their door.

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One February the lamplighter's boy climbed the stairs with a fever in his face and no penny in his pocket. Maud sat him by the stove and wound a new hoop while he talked. He had dreamed, he said, of a long road that kept folding back on itself, and of a man at the far end counting windows. She knotted a feather to the bottom, then a blue bead, then a second feather, and told him to sleep with his head under the ring.

He slept until noon. When Maud lifted the hoop, the thread had gone grey along one edge, as though something had pressed against it all night and carried off a little of its colour. She hung a second, smaller ring beneath the first, with a fresh brass wheel at its heart. Then she took her pencil and wrote across the bare plaster above the stove, because the boy had asked what the hoops were for.

He read it aloud slowly, the way children do, and Maud let him keep the last word for himself.