Colourful neo-traditional owl design set within a dreamcatcher with hanging feathers, drawn as a flash design with no body placement shown.

Owl and dreamcatcher design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised owl with a front-facing head, yellow eyes and a yellow beak sits at the centre of a brown dreamcatcher ring with a fine woven web. Five feathers hang from the ring, with the larger ones in teal and red, and the owl's plumage is built from scale-like shapes in the same palette. Bold dark outlines and solid flat colour fills give the drawing a graphic, high-contrast finish on a plain light grey background.

Neo-trad Owl Dreamcatcher Feather Web Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, and keep your hands out of the fire, because this is a true story and true stories want quiet. Above the last stile, where the beech wood thins into bracken, there hung a willow hoop bound in brown leather, with a web across it so fine the morning dew stood on every thread. Old Mrs Dunmore put it there the winter her husband went to sea and never came back, and she always said a dreamcatcher is only as good as the thing that sits on it.

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That thing was an owl called Hollin, who came each dusk with his yellow eyes lit like lamps and perched dead centre in the ring. His feathers were teal along the wing and red across the breast, and the scales on his chest were so neat that a man walking home from the Crown swore the bird had been painted onto the sky. Every night the bad dreams drifted up out of the valley, grey as wet wool, hunting for sleepers to sour. Hollin let them into the web and held them there until first light, when they thinned and blew apart like smoke. The feathers that dropped from him caught on the beads below, and the village children gathered them for luck.

Then came the autumn the miller's son, Edwin, decided a bird that eats nightmares ought to be paid for. He climbed up with a sack and a lantern while the whole village held its breath at the stile. Hollin regarded him with those flat yellow eyes for a long while. Then he opened his wings, and every dream the web had caught in forty years came loose at once, and Edwin came tumbling back down the bank shouting about his mother's face in the dark. He never climbed that hill again.

Mrs Dunmore's grandchildren still hang a hoop on the stile each winter. If you go up there at dusk you will find a red feather in the grass and a teal one beside it, and the owl will be sitting in the ring, waiting for you to close your eyes.