Dreamcatcher with three feathers

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of a dreamcatcher with a circular hoop, a radial web of curved lines and beads, and three hanging feathers. The feathers are filled with solid black and decorated with white dots and fine stripes. The design is centred on a plain white background with no body or skin visible.

Blackwork Geometric Dreamcatcher Feather Web Mandala Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had been at the washing again, so Nan Hebe climbed the ladder to the attic with a basket of pegs and a ball of waxed thread. The dreamcatcher hung where the last lodger had left it, a willow hoop bent round until the web sat inside it like a spider's careful sums. Three feathers swung from its base, black as wet slate, each one dotted with white beads that had come loose and rattled in the draught.

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Nobody at Gull Rest Boarding House could say who had made it. The guests came and went along the front: a schoolmaster, two sisters who hummed hymns under their breath, a man who paid in farthings and never stayed past the Thursday. Each of them, Hebe noticed, slept a little easier the night after they had slept beneath the web. She mended the loose knot, hung it back, and the next morning the sisters said they had dreamed of their mother's kitchen and the smell of bread.

Then a storm came off the North Sea and kept the boats in harbour for nine days. The bell rang through the nights and nobody on the top floor slept at all. Hebe sat on the attic stairs with her knees drawn up and watched the web shiver. Something caught in it, pale and wet, and she held her breath until it proved to be a single gull feather. She untangled it and kept it in her apron pocket.

When the sea lay flat again in spring, she took the three black feathers down and carried them to the shore. She pushed each one into the sand above the tideline. The tide came up, rolled them over, and carried them out past the groynes. She climbed back up the hill with the hoop under her arm, light as a cane ring, and hung it in the window where the morning sun could reach it.