Two black and grey Celtic knotwork band tattoos wrap around fingers on two hands, in a blackwork style on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot bands on two fingers

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows two hands with matching Celtic knot bands tattooed around the base of two fingers. The interlaced knotwork is rendered in solid black ink with fine grey shading that gives the bands a slight dimension. The ink is set against pale skin on a dark background, with the two bands sitting side by side across the frame.

Blackwork Hand Celtic knot Knotwork Band Ring Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the winter the Marigold freezes in at Brentwick lock, and Ada Pell teaches you the stopper knot on a length of tarred manila while the ice ticks against the hull. She ties it without looking, two loops chasing each other round a central post, over and under and back again, and tells you a knot like that has no end if you work it right. You try for a week in the cabin with the stove going, your fingers split and slick with tar, until the loops close clean and you can pull the standing end and feel the whole thing hold.

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Ada never lets anyone else take the tiller in the narrows, and she never lets anyone else cut her rope. When the Ouse floods the year you turn twelve, she sits you on the roof with a thermos and a coil of old line in her lap and works a second knot beside the first, smaller, tighter, the loops nearly touching. She says the knot is for keeping two things together that might otherwise drift, and that you're not to ask who the second one is for. You don't ask. You watch her hands, which are knuckled and brown and very steady.

Ada dies in March, in the bunk with the blue curtain, and the Marigold goes to the lock-keeper's boy, Tom Greaves, who has been sweeping her decks since he was small. Among her things you find the coil, and cut from it two bands of knotwork each the width of a finger, the loops worked so close you can barely see the line between one and the next. One is stiff with age. The other still smells faintly of tar.

You row out to the lock at dusk and find Tom on the gate beam, whittling nothing. You hold out the smaller band and say she wanted it kept. He turns it over in the lamplight, then holds out his own hand without a word, and you slip the knot down over his finger, where it sits snug as if it had always been measured for him.