Black outline drawing of a butterfly with interlaced Celtic knotwork filling its wings, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot butterfly line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly is drawn in black outline with its wings filled by interlaced knotwork and looping bands. The antennae curl at the tips and the body is formed by a central knotted panel. The drawing is flat line work on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Butterfly Celtic knot Knotwork Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink gave out halfway along the left wing, and Tomas sat with the pen lifted above the vellum, afraid to touch it down again. Brother Eanred had been clear about the knot. Every band must pass over and under its neighbour and return to the place it began, or the butterfly would fall apart on the page the moment it was finished. Tomas could not find where the band ended. He had followed it three times round the wing and it kept closing back on itself like a sleeper turning over.

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He went out to the orchard after the none bell to clear his head. Late August had stripped the lower branches of their windfalls, and wasps drowsed in the split apples while the grass hummed. Old Wenna, who kept the bees and asked nothing of anyone, sat on an upturned crate peeling a quince. 'You're looking at those trees as if they owe you money,' she said. He told her about the wing. She laughed and pointed with the knife at a white butterfly lifting off the cabbage row beyond the hedge. 'That one doesn't know where its wing stops either. It just keeps going until it's somewhere else.'

He returned to the scriptorium before vespers and found the band with his eyes shut, letting his finger run the path the way Wenna's hands had run the peel. It came round beneath the body, slipped under itself, and rose to the outer edge exactly where it had started. He inked the last loop and drew the antennae after, curling each tip as tight as a fern. When Eanred came to inspect the work he found a wasp sitting on the margin, drunk on quince, its legs caught in the wet ink. Tomas let it stay. Eanred said nothing about it, which Tomas took for approval.