Line drawing sheet of five Celtic knotwork designs in black outline, including a round knot, a square knot, a central knot with animal-like ends, and a heart-shaped knot.

Celtic knotwork design sheet

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing sheet labelled Plate 3 shows five interlaced Celtic knotwork designs of varying shapes, with a small circular test pattern at the left. The knots are drawn with uniform, unshaded outlines on a plain white background. The designs are arranged in a loose grid, with the largest knot in the centre and the others placed around it.

Geometric Celtic knot Knotwork Interlace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour was still warm on the bench when Nan slid the plate across to me and said nothing about the three failures in the bin. Outside the shutters on Harrow Lane were still grey. I had been at it since half three, trying to plait a six-strand loaf the way she did without looking, each strand going over and under the next until the whole thing seemed to hold itself together like a rope that refused to end.

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Above the proving racks she had pinned a sheet of paper gone yellow at the corners. It was covered in pencil copies of knotwork she had traced from an old library book when she was my age, five designs of different shapes, and a tiny circle in one corner she called the test pattern. "If you can't get the small one right," she said, "the big ones will lie to you." I had never understood what she meant until I tried the circle on a scrap of dough, looping each strand under, then back, and found that it closed without a start or an end.

She came in at quarter to five with flour to the elbows, looked at my plait, and said it was crooked. Then she laughed, took the bread knife, and cut my loaf straight down the middle to show me the centre, where every strand turned back into the one beside it. "Get the middle right first," she said, "and the rest has no choice but to follow."

We ate the heel of it standing at the bench while the sky over the car park went from black to the colour of weak tea, and the first van rattled past with the milk. She didn't say it was good. She just took the other end and tore it in two.