Pencil and colour sketch of a grey Celtic knot ringed by green and purple thistles, a tattoo design drawn on paper.

Celtic knot with thistles

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil and marker drawing of an interlaced Celtic knot with a grey, shaded ribbon form at its centre. A ring of green stems and purple thistle heads surrounds the knot, placed in the centre of a white sheet. The linework is dark and the shading is soft, with colour applied only to the thistles and stems.

Botanical Celtic knot Thistle Interlace Knot Stem Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawser had gone soft in the middle watch, and Mrs Gunn, who ruled the galley and the ship's gossip in equal measure, told you to re-lay the end before the Cape rather than after. So you sat on an upturned bucket on the foredeck with a marlinspike across your knees, working the strands the way your father had shown you on the Leith slip, over and under, until the rope remembered it was meant to hold.

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Halfway through, the pattern wanted to close on itself. Three loops chasing one another with no beginning and no end, the sort of thing the old carvers cut into standing stones along the Fife coast. Mrs Gunn had a name for it: the thistle knot. Her grandmother had stitched it into every shirt cuff in Musselburgh and swore it kept the sea from taking a man who wore a sprig of the flower in his cap. You had laughed at that. Nobody laughs on a ship with a feverish boy below and fourteen days of grey water still to cross.

Tam was the boy, and on the third day out he had stopped asking for his mother. Mrs Gunn kept a tin box of soil on the rail by the galley door, and she had been coaxing a thistle in it since Gravesend, watering it from the kettle when nobody was looking. That morning its purple head had opened in the spray, bristling and absurd, and she had carried it down to the bunk like a lantern.

The storm came through at dusk and the rope held. In the grey hour after, you found Tam awake, his hand curled round the thistle's stalk, the knot you had finished lying coiled on the deck beside him like something that had always been there.