Black and grey flash sheet showing a Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork beside a Claddagh design with a crown, heart and hands, labelled with their names.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic cross and Claddagh flash designs

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows two line drawings side by side: a Celtic cross with a ringed head, interlaced knotwork panels and a dense plaited shaft, and a cross with a Claddagh motif of a crowned heart held by two hands, with a shamrock above. Linework is bold and even, with some fine shading and stippled grey tones on the Claddagh cross. Both designs are labelled in bold lettering beneath them, and the layout is clean on a plain white background.

Knotwork Shamrock Crown Heart Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Doherty had counted the spoons twice before the Galway bus was due, and she was still one short when the rain came sideways off the bay and rattled the sash. Kitty Lavelle, who had come to help with the breakfasts that summer, stood at the dresser with a tin of shortbread in her hands and pretended not to hear the boots on the back stairs.

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The lodger in the room over the scullery had paid a month in advance and asked for nothing but a view of the harbour wall and a kettle that worked. He carved wooden spoons for the fishermen's wives, and he had a way of turning a length of tarred string into a knot that lay flat as a plait. Kitty had seen him once, when he thought the kitchen was empty, scratch a ringed cross into the margin of a tide table with the point of his penknife, its arms looped over themselves like rope that had forgotten where it began.

The spoon was not in the scullery drawer, but the silver was. Tucked under the lining paper of the tin, where nobody would look, was a small ring: a crown, two hands clasping a heart, a shamrock worn smooth on one side. Kitty ran down to the quay with it in her fist. The harbourmaster said the Inishbofin boat had gone at first light, and the man had paid his bill in coins, every one of them counted out on the step.

Kitty stood at the edge of the wall until the wind found the gaps in her coat. Then she slid the ring onto the loop of string at her wrist, where it sat with the heart turned inward toward her own palm, and she walked back up the hill to finish the breakfasts.