Black ink drawing of a tree of life inside a dreamcatcher hoop with three hanging feathers and beads, in a fine line style.

Tree of life dreamcatcher design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a tree of life with branches and roots filling a circular hoop, with a bead-strung cord and three feathers hanging from the bottom and sides. The linework is fine and dense, using hatching and stippling to shade the feathers and branches. It is rendered entirely in black ink on pale paper, with no colour.

Fine line Botanical Tree of life Dreamcatcher Feather Bead Hoop Branches Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Harrow cut the willow for the hoop at the top of the tidal creek, bent it green over her knee until it held, and bound the join in waxed twine so tight her thumbs bled. Her husband Tom laughed at her for it. He said dreamcatchers were for children and gulls, then took the Brightwater out past the breakwater at four every morning regardless, while the town was still asleep and the lamps on the pier were the only colour in the grey.

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The tree was her own idea. She had sketched it on the back of a tide table: a trunk that split into branches, the branches into more branches, and roots that ran down through the hoop as though the whole thing were planted in the air. Beneath it she hung three feathers, a herring gull's, a cormorant's, and a grey one she had found snagged on the net shed door after the equinox gale, which she never told him about.

On the Thursday the Brightwater came back without him. The coastguard found her drifting inside the harbour mouth with her nets still out and her engine cold, and nobody could say why. Mags sat by the window with the hoop in her lap, counting the beads over and over, and somewhere in the small hours she noticed that the branches had grown. Not moved. Lengthened, the way a tree does after a wet spring.

On the Saturday a single green shoot had pushed through the twine at the knot of the roots. She hung the hoop above the door where the first light would reach it, and she made tea, and when the lane outside began to creak with a man's uneven footsteps she did not go to meet him. She kept her eyes on the leaves, because she had learned that a dream held too tightly gets lost, and she wanted to be sure he was still in it.