Painted flash design of an interlaced Celtic knotwork serpent with a pale skull-like head, in blue-grey, ochre and rust on a parchment background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knotwork serpent with skull head

Colour · Flash

A tall vertical design of a knotwork serpent with a pale skull-like head at the top, its body filled with interlaced bands and sawtooth edges. The palette is muted blue-grey, ochre, rust and cream on a parchment-toned background. The head curls to the left and the body loops down to a knotted base, with the dimensions 9 x 24 printed below.

Serpent Knotwork Skull Interlace Dragon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot had forbidden beasts in the margins of the Gospels, but the snow had shut the pass by the time Brother Edric finished the page, and by the third day the lamp oil was low and the abbot had stopped climbing the stair.

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Edric had drawn the knot first, a single unbroken line that started at the foot of the vellum and wound back on itself until no one could follow it. Then he gave it a body, and the body wanted teeth. He cut the sawtooth edges with a ruling pen and laid down blue-grey wash from woad he had ground himself, with ochre from a pedlar's lump and rust from the old wine stain on the sill. The head he left until last, because he did not know what it should be. In the end he drew a skull, the long jaw of a sheep he had found bleached on the moor road, because that was what the snow had given him.

On the fourth morning the abbot came up with a candle and stood a long while over the page. He did not scold. He traced the knot with one finger, stopping where the line passed under itself, and said that a knot is only a promise to come back to where you began. Then he asked whether the serpent was swallowing its own tail or simply looking for the way out.

Edric did not answer. He dipped the pen in rust and began the border, and outside the wind dropped, and somewhere below a bell rang for the first time in three days, thin and cold through the shutters.