Black and white line drawing of a Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork panels on each arm, a ringed circle and a central knot, shown as a tattoo design.

Celtic cross with interlace knotwork

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A tattoo design of a Celtic cross with a surrounding ring, showing the cross arms, the central circle and the long shaft filled with interlaced knotwork. The linework is bold and even, with solid black areas framing the white knot bands. The image is a flat black and white design with no shading or colour and is centred on a plain white background.

Blackwork Knotwork Interlace Cross Circle Ring

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your thumb on that edge, boy, or the stone will take a bit of you for its trouble. Eleven hundred years this shaft has stood on Carrig Hill with the rain going through it, and it has never once been given a wrong knot by a man listening to his own temper. So set your chisel down and put the mallet away.

Keep reading

You cut the knot like you are in a hurry to be somewhere else. A band of interlace has to be followed the whole way round, over and under, over and under, and it must come back to the place it started without a single break. The old men who laid out these crosses thought an unbroken line was a kind of prayer, and that a soul which found its way around the arm of the cross would not lose itself on the hill.

Last Tuesday you asked me why the ring goes round the head at all, and I told you it holds the arms up. That is true, but it is not the whole of it. Look here, under the lichen, where the third strand runs out to nothing. The mason who carved this before me, Donal O Riain, cut it that way on purpose. Forty years he hammered at this stone and he left one thread loose, so that a person coming up the hill in the dark could find where the pattern began.

The rain came in sideways off the bog. Fergal knelt and ran his thumb along the gap, slowly, the way you would feel for a pulse. 'Good,' the old man said. 'Now cut me the other end.'