Red and grey Celtic knotwork tattoo with a winged, symmetrical design across the upper back, shown on a person's bare shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic knotwork winged design on upper back

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A symmetrical Celtic knotwork design with interlaced loops and a winged, butterfly-like top spreads across the upper back and tapers into a knotted column down the spine. The linework is outlined in red and shaded in grey, with the grey areas appearing lilac-toned against the skin. The photograph is taken from behind, centred on the tattoo, with a dark background and a hand and smoke visible at the upper right edge.

Back Celtic knot Knotwork Wing Interlace Spine Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessie Quill had been trying to get the lift in Harlow House working since March, and by the third week of October he had stopped pretending it was a mechanical problem. He climbed the stairs with a toolbag and a flask, counting landings out loud because the numbers on the doors had faded to nothing. On the fourteenth floor the strip lights buzzed like insects caught under a glass.

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The lift's control board sat behind a panel painted so many times that the screws had seized. Under the grime he found a scrap of red thread knotted round the frame, and beside it a diagram pencilled on the back of a council notice: a winged shape, loops inside loops, the wings lifting out of a column that ran down to the floor. Someone had drawn the same pattern in chalk on the landing plaster, then gone over it in grey. Dessie knew the curl of the tail. It was his mother's hand.

He sat on the step for a long while. She had lived on the nineteenth floor until the damp got into her chest, and she always said the knot had no start and no finish, so it could hold a thing without letting it out. He had thought that was nonsense. Now he traced the loops with his thumb and felt the lift hum somewhere below, as if the building had been waiting for someone to read the drawing properly.

He unscrewed the panel and followed the red wire where it doubled back on itself, three times, before it reached the relay. He fixed it in ten minutes. When the doors opened on the ground floor he rode up again just to hear it climb, and on the way he drew the knot across his palm with a biro, so he would remember where the pattern began.