Black ink drawing of a dreamcatcher with a tree of life inside its hoop, hanging feathers and beads, drawn in fine line on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatcher with tree of life and feathers

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a dreamcatcher whose upper hoop contains a bare, branching tree. A smaller hoop with a radiating web hangs below, and five feathers and several beads dangle from the frame. The linework is fine and uses hatching for shading on the feathers and trunk, in black and grey on a cream background.

Fine line Dreamcatcher Tree of life Feather Bead Web Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The willow hoop had slipped its binding again, so Morag Teague stood on a kitchen chair with a mouthful of pins and tried to coax it round. Her son had cut the ring from a storm-felled ash the winter before he went south for work, and it still held the curve of the bough. Inside it she had strung the branches of a tree she could not look at without thinking of him, bare at the top where the frost had got in, dark and thick at the root where the sap still ran.

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Below the tree the smaller hoop hung on its thread of linen, and the web across it was spun so tight that a moth could not pass. Her grandmother had taught her that a web catches what sleeps badly and lets the good dreams through. Morag had never quite believed it, but she had kept the rule. Every night she tied a bead of jet to the lowest thread, and every night the beads knocked softly against the sill when the wind came off the loch.

On the morning the ferry failed to run, a letter came by the hand of the postman, who was too cold to speak. It was in her son's careless hand and said only that he had found a berth on a boat and would be home before the ash put out its buds. She read it twice at the table. Then she took the scissors from the drawer and cut a single strand from the web, the one nearest the root, and left the gap there on purpose.

By spring the ash had green in its fingers, and the gull and crow feathers stirred at the frame. Morag slept with the window open a crack, and the web, with its one loose thread, trembled all night like something listening.