Two versions of a three-armed Celtic knotwork triskele design, one in dark green and one in cream on dark brown, shown as flat drawings with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic triskele knotwork in two colourways

Geometric · Colour · Flash

The image shows two flat vector drawings of a three-armed Celtic triskele built from interlaced knotwork bands. The left version uses dark green lines on a white background, and the right version uses cream bands edged in dark brown. Both are symmetrical, with the three lobes of the knot sweeping outwards from a central interlaced core.

Geometric Celtic knot Knotwork Interlace Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats came in on the flood tide, three of them every time, bow to stern in a line that the harbour wall could not hold. Old Morwenna kept the count on a slate by the net loft door, and she never once wrote a number that did not match the men who walked up the shingle. Her son Tamsin had gone out in the spring with the Gull and the Hare and the Wren, and by midsummer the slate still showed three marks beside his name, which was how she knew he was fishing.

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The sea off Carrack Head ran in loops that year. The old men said the current went round on itself like a dog settling, and that a boat caught in one of its turns would circle until the wind gave up. Morwenna walked the cliff path each evening with a loaf wrapped in cloth and laid it on the flat stone where the path bent. She did not pray over it. She only said the names of the three boats, one after another, and the names came out in a knot each time, because she could never get the first one free of the second.

In October the Hare came in alone and sat low in the water. Tamsin was not in her. Dunstan, who had steered her, said they had followed the loop out past the reef and lost sight of the Gull and the Wren in the spray, and had only run for home when the light went. He was crying, and no one blamed him for it.

Morwenna went up the path that night as she always did. Under the stone there was a length of rope, tarred and knotted, which no fisherman had left there. She knew the lay of it at once. Three lobes swept out from a single tangled heart, each lobe looping back through the other two. She untied it in the dark, the way her mother had taught her to untie a bad hitch, and found the middle was not knotted at all. It was one strand, running round and round until it came back to where it began. She coiled it on her arm and walked down to the harbour, where the Gull's lamp was already burning in the mouth of the bay.