Black and grey Celtic knotwork cross with the words Tell me I can't above and And I'll show you I can below, tattooed on a calf.

Celtic cross with quote lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey Celtic cross with knotwork filling each arm sits at the centre of the design. The quote Tell me I can't curves above the cross and And I'll show you I can sits below it, both in a bold blackletter-style script. The shading is smooth and grey, and the tattoo is photographed straight on against skin and a dark sleeve at the top of the frame.

Lettering Calf Knotwork Quote Lettering Cross

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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

Right, sit closer, the wind off the loch gets into old bones and mine are older than most. You'll want to hear about Mairead Dunlevy and the broken cross at Carrick Tor.

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Nobody in the glen would sell her a chisel. The master mason said a girl's hands would crack the knotwork before she finished the first arm, and the abbot's men laughed when she asked for a block from the quarry above the castle. Every evening she came back to the chapel steps with grit in her hair and told them the same thing: tell me I can't, and I'll show you I can.

She worked through a winter. The knots were the hard part, one unbroken cord weaving over and under itself until a body could lose its way in it. She learned to follow it with a wet thumb, the way you'd trace a river back to its spring. By Candlemas the cross stood on the chapel wall, four arms of interlace, each one turning back on itself so that no end could be found.

The master came at dusk to see it. He ran his palm over the stone, found no seam, and said nothing for a long while. Then he went to the corner where the old cross lay half-buried in nettles and kicked it over. Underneath, cut into the base, were the marks of a hundred apprentices who had been told the same thing and given up. Mairead added her own mark beside them, and went home to her supper.