Hand-drawn dreamcatcher design with a yin yang centre and patterned feathers in teal, purple and pink ink, shown on a sketchbook page.

Dreamcatcher with yin yang centre

Colour · Flash

A dreamcatcher drawn in pen on paper, with a circular hoop filled with dense zentangle-style patterns and a black and white yin yang at its centre. Four feathers hang below, each filled with fine striped and scalloped linework. The design uses teal, purple and pink ink with black and white detailing, and the drawing is photographed at an angle on a sketchbook page.

Dreamcatcher Yin yang Feather Mandala Circle

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, you, and mind the draught from the tunnel mouth, because this is the part where the wind gets into the story. Eighty years back the night mail came through Ashcombe Junction at twenty past one every night, and it carried more than post. Folk slept in the carriages with their hopes folded up in their coats, and the dreams drifted out through the open windows like moths after a lamp.

Keep reading

Nell Harker was the signalman's girl, and she sat in the box with a bicycle wheel she'd stripped of its tyre. She laced it with black cotton, striped like a platform edge, and across the middle she painted two halves that chased each other round, one violet, one the green of the sea wall at Dunmere. A dot of white on each side, so the thing could tell which way was up. Her father thought it a foolish toy. He stopped thinking so the night the mail came in with its lamps out and nobody on it awake.

She hung four feathers from the rim, gathered off the gulls that nested on the water tower and dyed with ink the colour of a bruise going off. Every dream that passed the box snagged in the web, and she sorted them by lamplight: the ones that were only worry went down the line in the coal wagon, and the ones with a road in them she let through to the platform. Nobody ever asked what she did with the ones that stayed.

So when the last train pulls out tonight, look at the window. If there's a hoop turning slow above the rails, that isn't the wind. That's Nell, still sorting, and she's kept one back for you.