Pencil sketch of a mandala dreamcatcher with a shaded feather and trailing ribbons, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala dreamcatcher with feather sketch

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a circular mandala with a dense radial pattern of petals, dots and scalloped rings, attached to a feather with ribbon wrapped around its quill. The linework is fine and the feather is shaded with soft graphite to show depth, while the ribbons trail down and across the lower half. The drawing is entirely black and grey on a pale background, with a balanced composition that fills the page.

Geometric Dreamcatcher Mandala Feather Ribbon Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Margaret,

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The wind has been out of the north-east for nine days and the lamp room smells of paraffin and wet wool. Tom says I am being fanciful, but I have hung the old wheel of willow and sinew from the hook above the stairs, the one you sent from Orkney the year we married. Its feather had come loose, so I bound it again with the blue ribbon from Ruth's christening gown, wound round and round the quill until it looked less like a mend and more like a decision.

Every night I climb the stairs and look at the rings of it in the lamplight: the petals opening out from the middle like the dahlias on the crofter's wall, and the little dots that Ruth used to count before she could count anything else. Tom says the net is for catching bad dreams. I told him bad dreams are no use to anybody, and that I wanted it to catch the foghorn instead, so that when the boats are out I can hear the note going round and round in there, quiet and sure, and not just the one blast over and over.

Last Tuesday the fog came down so thick the rail disappeared, and a skiff came feeling its way past the skerries with its lamp gone out. Tom sounded the horn until his lips split. I stood under the wheel with my hand on the feather. When the skiff's bow nosed into the harbour light I saw the ribbon lift, just a little, the way a sleeve lifts when someone has come in from the cold.

Write soon. Tell Dad the gulls have taken the bait box again.

Ellen