Line drawing of a Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork in red, blue and green, shown as a tattoo design without a body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic cross with red and blue knotwork

Colour · Flash

A Celtic cross is drawn in outline with interlaced knotwork running through the arms and shaft. Heart-shaped loops appear in the upper, left, right and lower sections, and the knots are traced in red and blue on a green outer ring and cross outline. The design is centred on a plain white background with even line weight and no shading.

Knotwork Interlace Cross Circle

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

The rain had come down on Sallow Market since Tuesday, and by Friday the cobbles ran like a millrace between the stalls. Maud Pellow kept her thread under a tarpaulin at the far end, beside the clock that had stopped at a quarter past nine in her grandmother's time. Red spools on the left, blue on the right, and a hank of green wool that nobody bought because nobody knew what to do with it.

Keep reading

A man came up the lane that Friday with his collar turned high and asked for a length to tie a gate shut. Maud gave him red and blue, wound twice, and showed him the knot her mother had shown her: a loop, a tuck, and a second loop folded back on itself so the shape came out like a heart. He said it was pretty for a gate. She said the heart was the part that held. The old cross-maker, Tomas Ebbing, had taught every apprentice he ever had the same thing, that a knot without a heart in it would slip the moment the weather turned.

He came back at dusk with the thread in his fist. The loops had come undone, he said, and the gate was hanging by one corner. Maud took the length from him and held it under the lamp. Someone had tied the hearts open at the bottom, where the eye could not see. She picked the whole thing apart with her thumbnail and tied it again, slow, the way Tomas had worked his knots into the oak. When she handed it back the rain was still falling, but the green wool on the nail behind her had begun to darken at the edges, the way a ring does when it is finally finished.