Black and white design of a pentagram framed by five interlaced Celtic knotwork ravens, with a knotted star at its centre, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot pentagram with five ravens

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design of a five-pointed star outline with a bold black pentagram, surrounded by five stylised birds with spread wings, each filled with fine interlacing Celtic knotwork. A knotted star sits at the centre, and interlaced loops link the points of the pentagram. The image is entirely black linework on a white background, with no colour and no body part visible.

Geometric Pentagram Raven Bird Celtic knot Star Knotwork Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ravens came back on the eleventh day out of Cork, when the water had gone the colour of pewter and the last of the ship's biscuit had turned to dust in the tin. You hear them before you see them, a rattle of wings over the mainmast, and the boy on the forecastle swears one of them has your father's cough. You do not laugh. You count them instead, the way the old woman on Valentia taught you to count gulls, and there are five, circling the wind in a ring as if they were tied to a single rope.

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Your grandmother's sea-chart is folded inside your coat. Its margins are knotted with ink, loops that run over and under each other and never end, and she told you the knots were the paths birds take when they carry a soul home. Five ropes, five birds, one star drawn in the middle where the compass should be. You unfold it on the binnacle and the knotted star at its centre has no beginning, so you cannot say which way is north.

Captain Moran says the ravens are bad luck and orders the cook to toss the crusts over the side to fatten them, which makes no sense to anyone but him. You watch the birds drop lower until their wings fan out above the rail, black on grey, every feather cut in fine lines like lace. The loops on their wings match the loops on your chart. You follow them with your finger, and they lead you round and round without ever arriving.

On the twelfth morning the cloud splits open over a low green shore, and the ravens peel away one by one, each to a different point of the compass. You are the last at the rail. You tuck the chart back into your coat and, for the first time since Cork, you do not look at the water.