Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a dagger wrapped in Celtic knotwork with a bird-head pommel and crossguard, shaded in black and grey.

Celtic knotwork dagger with bird pommel design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of a dagger with a crossguard, its blade wrapped in interlaced knotwork and its pommel shaped like a bird's head. The knotwork bands, scrolls and spirals are outlined in fine black lines and shaded in grey to suggest depth and relief. The design is shown in black and grey on a plain pale background, centred and filling the page.

Dagger Knotwork Bird Spiral Scrollwork Sword Celtic knot

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

Sit yourselves down on that wall, and mind the thyme, it bruises if you sit on it. Now. You want the story of the knife with the bird on its head, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the bees listening.

Keep reading

There was a smith in Wrexley called Osric Fenn, who could not make a blade that would not sing when you drew it. He had one piece of work he never finished. It was a dagger for his brother, who had gone over the hills to the salt towns and not come back. Every evening Osric wound a new band of knotting round the grip, over and under, over and under, and every morning he unwound a little of it because it was not right yet.

Then came the winter the river froze to the bottom, and his wife Ada took the dagger out of the forge and carried it up to the orchard. She did not say why. She dug beneath the old medlar tree where the roots run like rope, and she laid the blade in the dark with its point to the north. She set a small silver crow on the pommel, its beak open, and said, "Watch the gate for him."

Years later a boy with a spade came to dig the medlar out. The spade rang on iron. When they lifted the dagger, the crow on its head had turned its beak towards the house, and it has been looking there ever since, so mind how you go in at that gate.