Blue Celtic knotwork design with a dragon head at the top, drawn in solid flat ink on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knot with dragon head

Colour · Flash

A flat, solid blue illustration of a dragon head emerging from the top of a circular Celtic knot. The interlaced bands are drawn as uniform outlines with no shading, and the dragon's head and jaw are defined by the same clean linework. The design is centred on a plain white background, with no body part or skin visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Cadoc had spent three days tracing the same loop of ribbon around the margin of the psalter, and on the fourth morning the dragon at the top of the page lifted its jaw out of the knot and asked him, politely, to stop.

Keep reading

'You have been going round me for a week,' it said, in a voice like parchment being folded. 'Every band I am bound to, you bind again. The abbot wants a border that never ends, and I am tired of being the thing that makes it end nowhere.' Cadoc set down his quill. The ink was the blue of the Llanwern river in winter, woad ground with a little lamp-black begged from the kitchen, and it had dried on his thumb in the shape of a crossing.

He asked how a dragon could tire of a knot. The dragon said a knot has no way out, only over and under, and that it had spent three hundred years searching for the one place where the bands crossed wrongly. 'Find it for me,' it said, 'and you may leave the scriptorium before vespers.' So Cadoc followed the cords with his finger, over, under, over, until he reached a crossing where a band of the outer ring simply lay down and let the inner one pass through it, as if the two had agreed to it.

He did not tell the abbot. He drew the crossing exactly as it was, wrong and beautiful, and when the psalter went to the lord's chapel the monks praised the border for its endless patience. The dragon still lifts its head at the first bell to see whether anyone has noticed, and in the margin Cadoc left one knot unfinished so that it would have something to be proud of.

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