Black and grey pencil drawing on paper of a tattoo design showing three dreamcatchers with trailing feathers and a flock of birds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dreamcatchers, feathers and birds design

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing on paper shows three dreamcatchers hanging at different heights, each with a woven web and beads, and long feathers trailing down from them. A flock of birds flies across the lower part of the sheet, with some rendered as soft silhouettes. The work uses grey shading and fine hatching on a pale background, with no colour.

Dreamcatcher Feather Bird Flock Web

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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

The first tray of bloomers was out and cooling before the yard light had properly warmed, and I had a sprig of rosemary between my teeth while I hung the net over the back door. Nan made them from willow and waxed thread, and she swore a dreamcatcher only worked if you let the bad dreams fall through the middle. Mine had been up three winters. It had caught nothing but moths and the odd bit of flour fluff.

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Around half four the starlings came down on the chemist's chimney across the road, a grey crowd that shifted and settled like a cloth being folded. When the oven door clanged they all rose at once, a ribbon flung over the car park, and I counted them the way Nan counted stitches. Eleven, twelve, then the stragglers. Some mornings a single feather would be turning in the web when I came to check it, grey and barred, as if the birds had been leaving their night thoughts behind.

That morning there was a long one, caught by the quill in the middle of the net. I took it inside and laid it on the proving cloth beside the dough. Rosa, who runs the counter and never believes a word I say, said it was a pigeon feather and I should stop romancing the bread. I told her a pigeon would have been too heavy for the net. She laughed and sent the first customers round to the back.

By six the sky over the bypass had gone the colour of weak tea, and the flock came back over the roof, low enough that I could hear the wings. I stood in the doorway with the feather in my fist and watched them head west towards the reservoirs, until there was nothing left to count but the warm smell of the loaves and the net turning slowly on its hook.