Black and grey Celtic trinity knot with swirling flourishes and the script words Qui estis, tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Celtic knot and script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A trinity knot with interlaced loops sits above the script words Qui estis, with a curling flourish on each side. The linework is bold and clean, and the knot is shaded in grey while the lettering and swirls are solid black. The subject is centred on a close, slightly angled view of the upper back and shoulder.

Lettering Back Celtic knot Trinity knot Triquetra Swirl Script Latin text

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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

Brother Aidan, the gatehouse bell rang twice before Compline, which means a stranger, so I went down to the water gate with a lamp expecting a carter with salt fish. Instead there was a woman in a cloak stiff with estuary spray, standing beside a currach she had clearly rowed across alone. She held out a copper ring cut with three loops that chased each other round a hollow centre, and asked me, in Latin worse than mine, who we were. Qui estis. I nearly laughed. Ask a monk what he is and you will sit through an hour of answers, and I had none short enough for the rain.

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The abbot's rule is that no one is turned from the water gate, so I brought her into the scriptorium where the Gospel book lay open under weights. I had been painting the same knot in the margin for a week, a line that climbs over itself and never once ends, and when she laid her ring beside my ink pot the two looked like sisters. I told her we were the ones who kept the loops going, copying what came before so it would not be lost. She looked at the page for a long time and said that was not an answer, it was a job.

She was right, and I told her so. She took her ring back, pressed a wet thumb to the wet ink of my margin, and smudged one loop into the next so the knot was no longer closed. Then she rowed back into the dark without another word.

This morning I entered her in the ledger as a visitor, and beside her name I drew the knot again, carefully, with the loop left open at the top. Under it I wrote the only answer I have found so far, which is that we are whoever comes back to finish the line.