Black and grey realism tattoo of two feathers, a dreamcatcher and a flock of birds, with the word dream in script, on the ankle.

Feathers and dreamcatcher with birds on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two shaded feathers angle across the skin, with a flock of small birds rising from the upper feather and a dreamcatcher hanging beside them. The feathers are rendered in soft grey shading with fine linework on the dreamcatcher web and strands, and a cursive word runs down beside the hoop. The image is black and grey, shown in a close-up photograph with a soft, muted background.

Realism Lettering Ankle Feather Dreamcatcher Bird Script Dream

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, all of you, and hush the fiddle a minute, because this is the bit about the willow woman and the goose feathers. Her name was Hester Gale and she lived at the end of the Hallow Drove, where the dyke runs black in January. Every spring she bent green willow into hoops round her knee, bound them with waxed thread, and strung each one with a web so fine you could not tell where the threads began.

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A neighbour's boy went off to the herring boats at fourteen and came back at twenty with one hand that would not close. He sat on her step all that summer and would not speak, so Hester did what she knew. She took three grey goose quills, singed their tips over the range, and bound them so they lay across one another like two sleepers turning over. She hung a hoop beneath them and told him that a web catches what is meant for the sleeper and lets the rest blow out to sea.

The boy said nothing. In the morning the step was empty and the quills were gone from the hook, and by noon the starlings from the sugar beet fields had risen off the drove in one dark sheet. The boy was standing in the middle of them with his bad hand held open to the sky.

Hester never saw him again. The hoop still hangs in the church porch, and if you go and look you will find a word worked in the lower rim, though nobody has ever agreed what it says. Some say it is dream. I say it is the last thing she told him, which was to go on.