Black outline drawing of an interlaced Celtic heart knot on a white background, shown as a design with no body placement.

Celtic heart knot line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A heart outline filled with interlaced Celtic knotwork made of looping bands with a continuous over-and-under weave. The design is drawn in black linework on white with no shading, and it is composed symmetrically with the knot centred inside nested heart shapes.

Geometric Heart Celtic knot Knotwork Interlace Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you go lifting that lamp glass with your bare hands, Ada, not while the tide's making. Sit where I can see you. My grandfather kept the light on Scarrow Head for thirty-one years, and he never once let the stair go dark, and he always said the reason was a length of tarred cord and a rope-maker called Nessa Quill.

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Nessa lived in the cottages below the headland, and her husband took the herring boat out past the Skerrs one February. The gale came in before he reached the bar. She sat at her frame through every night after that, weaving a heart out of cord, one strand that ran over and under itself and never once stopped. You could lay a finger on it and follow the whole shape around, through every loop and back to where you started, without lifting. She said a knot like that had no end to snap, and so it could not fail to bring a man home.

The boat never came back. But when the Scarrow light was failing that same winter, the oil low and the wick sulking, my grandfather climbed up with her heart pinned to his coat. He traced it with his thumb, round and round, counting each crossing as an hour he had to hold on. He held on until dawn, and the ships saw it.

That knot hangs in the lamp room still, gone the colour of weak tea. Nobody living can tell you where Nessa's strand begins or where it ends, and that is the whole trick of it, love. Now give me that glass, and mind the tide.