Pencil flash design of two heart-shaped dreamcatchers with feathers and butterflies, above and below a line of cursive script; no body placement shown.

Heart dreamcatchers, butterflies and script on paper

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper shows two heart-shaped dreamcatchers with flower-like centres, hanging feathers and small beads, with butterflies placed at the upper right and lower left. A line of cursive script runs across the centre of the sheet, and the butterflies and feathers are finished with light shading. The drawing is in greyscale and is arranged as a sheet of design ideas on a dark background.

Lettering Geometric Dreamcatcher Heart Feather Butterfly Script Quote Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in off the Minch at four, and your uncle was still out with the creel boat. You climbed the iron stairs of the lamp tower with the paraffin can knocking against your knee, past the rail where Mairi had hung her dreamcatcher years before. Willow hoop, a heart of it, a flower stitched in the middle, and a row of grey gull feathers that turned whenever the wind found the gallery. She said it caught what the lamp drew in: moths in summer, the odd painted lady blown across from Ireland, bad dreams if you believed her, which you did not.

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The lamp coughed at half past five and went dark. Mairi had been dead a winter, and the glass was yours to keep now, along with her rules. Trim the wick. Trust the bell. Never read the compass in the lamp room, because the iron in the rock lied to it every fog. You had been sure of the compass, and you had been wrong about the reef once already that spring. So you stood with your back against the cold brass and pressed your palm flat to your chest, where the thud was steady and close to the left side, and you counted it out. Sixty beats, a turn of the wick, sixty more.

The bell on the reef answered at seven, thin and to the south. You struck the signal hammer in time with your own pulse, and out in the murk something turned its bow.

Tam's boat came in at nine with the tide, one oar missing and the crew cursing softly. Up in the lamp room the dreamcatcher was still turning on its nail, and a pale moth wing had caught in the willow beside a single gull feather. You left it there. Some things you keep because they found their own way to you.