Flash sheet of twelve black and white Celtic knot designs, each labelled with a code from C10 to C74, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot flash sheet with twelve designs

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of twelve Celtic knotwork designs, each labelled with a code from C10 to C74, with a short line of text at the top about the wider range. The designs include shields, circles, a square, a diamond, a hexagon and a cross, built from interlaced bands, with a few containing interlaced animal forms. The artwork is solid black line on a white background with no shading or colour.

Celtic knot Knotwork Cross Circle Shield Square Diamond Hexagon Interlace Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric said a knot must have no door in it. I had spent three weeks on the border of the psalter, pricking the vellum with a needle at every turn, and he came along the bench with his thumb already lifted to wipe my work away before he had even looked at it. "Find the end," he said. I searched for it under the lamp until my eyes watered. There was none. The band ran over and under itself and came back to where it started, as a band should.

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Then the wind came in off the sea that night and the shutters banged. I went down to the store room where the old exemplars were kept, the ones nobody copied any more. In one of them a beast had been drawn into the interlace: two long necks, a tongue, one foot caught in its own loop. Someone had hidden it so well that only a patient eye would find it. I sat with the candle until the wax ran over my fingers, and I understood that the knot was not a closed thing at all. It was a trap for the beast, and the beast had been there first.

In the morning I redrew my border. I kept Osric's rule, every band unbroken, every crossing tucked under and over. But at the lowest corner, where the vellum was thinnest and no one would look twice, I let a single tail slip out past the last loop and curl into the margin, and I gave it a small head with one open eye.

Osric scraped the page that afternoon, as I knew he would, and found nothing to scrape. He held the sheet up to the window for a long time. Then he set it back on the bench and said nothing, which from him was a blessing.