Black and grey realism tattoo of two stacked dreamcatchers with feathers on a person's upper back, with the word Family in script above them.

Stacked dreamcatchers with feathers on the back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two dreamcatchers are stacked vertically down the centre of the back, each with a woven web of fine lines around a central bead, and they hang from a beaded cord. Three feathers and a small beaded strand trail from the lower dreamcatcher, with the feathers shaded in soft grey tones. A small script word reading Family sits above the top hoop, and the design is shown in black and grey shading on warm skin.

Realism Back Dreamcatcher Feather Script Family Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hand me that ladle before the pot catches, and mind the bread, it's two days old. Right. You want the tale of the two hoops? Then sit on the flour sack and stop fidgeting, because I only tell it once a voyage and we're barely past the Azores.

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My mother's mother wove the first hoop from green willow the winter the men were away on the Dogger Bank. She laced it with waxed thread into a web as fine as a spider's working and tied a bead in the very middle, so the bad dreams would tangle in the lines and the good ones would slip through the hole. She hung it over the hearth where the smoke could reach it. When my uncle Edwin signed on as a boy aboard the Marigold, she made a second hoop, smaller, and joined the two with a beaded cord, so that he'd always have something of home swinging on the same line as his own.

The winter he was sent out, the wind came round the Horn and sat on us for nine days. Edwin couldn't sleep in the forecastle. Our cook then was a gruff old Scot called Pollard, and he found the boy crouched by my stove at three in the morning, turning a gull's feather over and over in his fingers. Pollard said nothing. He just pulled up a stool and set the kettle on. Edwin told him the bird had been too far from land, and he couldn't stop thinking about it. Pollard tied the feather to the lower hoop with a bit of tarred twine, and by dawn the wind had dropped.

When the Marigold tied up at Hull, the old hoop was still over the stove, its web gone grey with smoke, and the small one was tucked in Edwin's kit. He carried it home to his mother and hung it from her bedpost. Feathers don't last long at sea, they say, but those two were still swinging there when she died. Now mind, I never said the feathers were magic. I said they were feathers. Pass me that spoon, and let the soup rest.