Black ink flash sheet of six Celtic-style interlace designs, including animal knotwork bands, a round knot and a rectangular panel with a triskele.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic interlace flash sheet

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of six separate designs in bold black linework, mostly interlaced knotwork with stylised animal forms woven through the bands. The top, second and bottom designs are long horizontal borders, the centre left is a narrow animal-interlace strip, and the lower left is a round knot. The right-hand rectangular panel frames a central triskele inside a dense knotted border, and the composition is spaced evenly on a plain white background.

Blackwork Celtic knot Interlace Knotwork Animal Border Circle Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the rain got under the canvas of the Saturday market on Castle Street, you had sold three of the rubbings and the ink had started to run on the fourth. Mrs Okonedo at the fabric stall was already tutting at the drips. You kept your sheets pinned under a square of clear plastic and your thumb on the corner of the one you were working on, a band of knotwork that had taken four evenings to draw from a photograph of a cross-shaft in Northumberland.

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The trick, your father used to say, was never to follow a line you could not see the end of. Animals in a knot had a habit of turning back on themselves: a beast's neck became a tail, a tail became a loop, and the eye went round and round until you forgot which creature you had started with. You had learned to trace one body from its open jaws to the place it bit its own tongue, then lift the pen.

A boy in a yellow cagoule stopped and asked whether the round one was a shield. You said it was a wreath, which was nearer the truth. He wanted it for his notebook, so you tore him a copy from the spare sheet, and he paid in damp coins that smelled of the bus.

When the market packed up at four, you found the triskele sheet soaked through at one corner, the three spirals bleeding into the knot around them until they were hard to tell apart. You stood in the wet with it held flat against your chest, and for once you did not mind. The lines had gone soft at the edges, and the animals looked as though they had finally found their way out of the pattern.