Purple illustrated dragon coiled around a dreamcatcher with feathers hanging below, drawn as a tattoo design on a black background.

Purple dragon wrapped around a dreamcatcher

Colour · Flash

A purple dragon with folded wings and a horned head coils around a circular dreamcatcher with a radiating web and a central bead. Three feathers and small beads hang from the bottom of the dreamcatcher. The dragon and feathers are shaded in violet with pale highlights, set against a plain black background.

Dragon Dreamcatcher Feather Web Bead Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon arrived in Whitby on the third tide of October, rolled in brown paper and stamped with a Hull customs mark, and Ada Scoresby had to cut the twine with her teeth because her scissors were buried under a tray of jet beads. Inside was a ring of willow no wider than a saucer, and wound through it was something that was not quite a sculpture and not quite a beast. Its wings were folded tight as umbrellas. Its horned head rested against the rim as if it had been listening to the rain.

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Mr Haddow had ordered it from a sailor's widow in Scarborough who had been selling her late husband's carving tools to pay the rent. The note with it said only: keep the dreams from going out to sea. Ada had never liked the harbour at night, where the gulls cried like people calling names, and the dragon did nothing to help. She hung it over the shop counter with three goose feathers dyed the colour of murex, and in the morning a bead had rolled into the till drawer and the shutters stood open though she had bolted them herself.

She wrote to the widow to ask what the thing was for. The reply came back a week later, folded around a single feather. The dragon was never meant to keep dreams in, it said. It was meant to draw the sleepers' dreams out through the web and carry them down the cliff steps to the water, so that nobody in the town woke carrying a grief they had not earned. Ada read it twice. Then she unhooked the feathers, walked the dragon to the end of the pier at first light, and untangled the last bead from its tail.

She let the wind have it. The bead went out over the grey water, small and violet, and was gone before the gulls had finished their first complaint.