Drawing of a five-pointed Celtic knotwork design in cream with black outlines, with five coloured rings in purple, yellow, blue, red and green, on a teal background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot pentacle with coloured rings

Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical five-pointed knotwork design formed from interlaced cream bands outlined in black. Five circular rings in purple, yellow, blue, red and green sit over the knot at each point and along its edges. The design is centred on a flat teal background, photographed straight on.

Celtic knot Pentagram Knotwork Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fifth ring would not sit. Maud had soldered four of them already, purple, gold, blue and red, and each had closed clean as a held breath, but the green one kept slipping off the mandrel as though it had its own opinion about where it belonged. Outside the workshop window the Thursday market was packing up, and somewhere a church bell was practising the same three notes over and over.

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Her uncle had taught her that a knot is only a path that has agreed to come back to itself. You follow the cream band over, under, over, and every crossing is a decision somebody made long before you arrived. He had drawn the pentacle on the back of a feed bill in 1974, and the drawing had hung above the bench ever since, its bands gone the colour of old teeth. The rings were the part he never finished. Each one was meant to stand for two people in the town, and he had never said which two.

The wedding on Saturday was not hers to worry about. It belonged to a pair of schoolteachers who wanted something small. Still, the bride had come in on Tuesday with a photograph of a salt-stained tin box and asked whether five circles could be threaded through a single knot without any of them being cut. Maud had said yes before she thought it through, which was the way she said most things.

At half past five she gave up on the green ring and bent it by hand, a little wider than the mandrel, then set it on the crossing where the band turned back. It dropped into place with a sound like a latch. She held the piece up to the window. The five rings hung through the knot, each caught and none loose, and the last of the light came through the gaps in the cream bands like water through a net.