Chart of twelve black silhouette animals decorated with Celtic knotwork, each labelled with a name and date range, under the heading Celtic Animal Zodiac.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic animal zodiac flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows twelve animal silhouettes in solid black, including a stag, cat, snake, fox, bull, seahorse, wren, horse, salmon, swan, butterfly, wolf and falcon. Each figure carries white Celtic knotwork and spiral detailing, with its animal name and date range printed beside it in a serif typeface. The layout is a clean grid on a plain white background with the title set in a blackletter-style font across the top.

Stag Cat Snake Fox Bull Seahorse Horse Swan Butterfly Wolf Knotwork Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheet has hung above the seed locker since before the hull first cracked the ice, and you have learned to read it the way the old crew read weather. Stag, cat, adder, fox, bull. Each shape is cut from black card and carries its little white knots like stitching on a coat. Your thumb rests on the fox, because your thaw shift falls under it, and the dates beside it are the only calendar the ship's clock has not drifted away from.

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Nobody remembers who printed it. Oyelaran says a woman on the lower decks wrote the dates in her own hand, but the ink has gone the colour of stewed tea and the script is too small to check. What the crew agreed on in the first lean winter was that the rota would follow the animals rather than the numbers. The wolf keeps the locker in the dark months, the salmon carries the water lines, the falcon watches the glass. When your window opens you climb the rungs to the hatch and count the sacks of barley and beans the way the sheet counts days.

This spring Tomasz went down with a fever, and you took the wolf's cold watch from October into November, in the dark. On the third night the locker lamp failed. You sat in the frost with a torch clamped in your teeth, tracing the knots with your fingertips because you could no longer make them out. The pattern was tighter than you had expected, one loop running into the next, with no start and no end.

When the lamp came back you saw that the last knot of the falcon curled toward the stag, closing the ring. You took the stub of pencil from the hook, found the narrow margin under the falcon's dates, and wrote your own birthday there in small, careful figures. Then you went back to counting sacks, because the next keeper would need to find the place.