Black and grey Celtic knotwork cross inside a circle, with Latin words around it, tattooed across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knotwork cross on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large Celtic cross filled with interlaced knotwork sits inside a ring of banded lines, with Latin words set around the circle. The raised cross and ring are shaded in black and grey to give a three-dimensional, carved look. The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, with the cross centred on the outer arm.

Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Knotwork Circle Latin text Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last knot had to be finished before the rain came over the hill, so Tomás Brennan worked the chisel in small, careful taps while the old man watched from a camp stool at the cemetery gate.

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"Cut the words round the ring, Tomás," Declan Ferris said, "and leave the middle plain for the weather." He had paid for the cross in full a fortnight before, in brown envelopes of notes, because his wife Nora had died in March and he wanted her stone standing before he went after her. Tomás had cut ACCIPIAT at the top left, CINERES above, TERRA to the right and MEOS at the foot, the Latin his father had taught him to read from other people's gravestones. The last word wouldn't fit at full size, so he cut it smaller, and the letters crowded together like people waiting at a bus stop.

Declan had asked for the knotwork to be done by hand, not by the machine in the yard. Tomás asked him why. "Nora wove baskets in our back kitchen for forty years," the old man said. "Every one had a pattern you could follow with your finger, over and under, and never end. I want that on her, so she has something to hold onto down there."

By dusk the rain had come and the grooves had filled with water, so every interlace shone and the whole cross looked as if it had been bound shut with a length of wet cord. Declan laid one hand flat on the top of the arm and said nothing. Tomás packed the chisels into their leather roll and left him there with the earth taking the last of the light.