Black fine line dreamcatcher tattoo with three shaded feathers on the inner wrist, beside an orange leather strap.

Dreamcatcher with three feathers on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dreamcatcher is drawn in fine black linework on the inner wrist, with a star-like web of radiating lines inside a circular hoop. Three feathers hang below on thin chains, with soft grey shading along their edges. The photo is taken close up, with a hand and an orange leather strap visible above the tattoo against a striped black and white fabric.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Dreamcatcher Feather Web Circle Chain Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Penrose had mended nets on the quay for thirty years before she made her first dreamcatcher, and by then half the harbour wives were bringing her their husbands' old jerseys to hang from the hook above her door. She used willow from the boatyard, bent into a hoop and bound with tarred sinew, then laid the web inside it the way her father had taught her to lay out a star chart: one point at the centre, threads drawn out to the rim until the whole thing looked like a sun that had forgotten how to shine.

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Three feathers hung from the bottom, each on a chain of brass links no longer than a finger. Grey gull, she said, because gulls always came home to the harbour whatever the weather. The wives asked what it caught. Bad dreams, she told them, the sort that wake a man at four in the morning with cold water in his boots. The good ones went through the middle and found their way back to the sleeper by breakfast.

The night the Morwenna Jane failed to round the point, Mara sat up with her daughter Elin and watched the web turning slowly on its hook in the draught from the door. Elin asked what it could catch if the dream was not a dream at all. Mara did not answer. She kept threading the same needle until the lamp burned low, and when the boat came in on the first grey tide with a torn mainsail and her crew asleep in the bilge, she was still sitting there with the needle in her hand.

Nobody remembered afterwards who had hung the net outside the wheelhouse. They only knew the hoop had come down in the night and the feathers lay on the quay with their chains tangled, and that Mara went down to gather them before anyone else was awake. She tied them back on one by one, the long chain and the two short, and never said which of them had taken the weight.