Close photo of a black knotwork tattoo with a red script word and swirl beneath it, placed on the upper back.

Celtic knot with red script on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black knotwork motif of interlocking loops and a triangular outline dominates the image, drawn with bold, slightly soft-edged linework. Beneath it, red script lettering is flanked by red flourishes. The warm, close-cropped composition shows the tattoo centred on skin with a little hair at the top edge.

Back Knot Celtic knot Triangle Script lettering Lettering Swirl Flourish

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the rope you left on the hall table has gone stiff with salt, so I have stopped trying to coil it and simply tied the knot you showed me, the one with two little eyes stacked over a triangle. Mrs Pryce at number nine says it is a Celtic thing, a knot with no beginning, but I told her it was a knot with a beginning, because you made me start it on the second loop and it has never let me forget.

Keep reading

The house is quiet now the summer lodgers have gone. Three of them left the same morning on the bus to Aberystwyth, leaving a bread knife and a sea-coloured scarf behind. I have been sweeping sand from the stairs every morning, the way Dad used to, and every morning the sand comes back, pushed in under the front door by the wind off the bay. You would laugh at how I shout at it.

Last Thursday a woman came to the door asking for a room for a fortnight and would not give her name. She sat in the front parlour with a red pencil and wrote the same word over and over on the back of a ticket stub, looping the letters until the paper tore. I did not ask what it said. When she left she pressed the stub into my palm and it read simply: come back for the light. I have pinned it above the kettle.

Come home at Michaelmas if the boat allows. The knot is holding. I keep checking it, and it has not once come undone.

Love, Nell