Black and grey circular Celtic knotwork design with shaded interlaced ribbons, shown as a standalone drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circular Celtic knot design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a round Celtic knot made of interlaced ribbon-like bands that weave over and under one another within a black circular field. The bands are rendered in white and grey with soft gradient shading that gives them a three-dimensional look, and the edges of each band are outlined in black. The design is centred on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Geometric Celtic knot Knotwork Circle Interlace Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down where the peat smoke cannot get at your eyes, and mind the dog, he is older than your grandfather's boat. You want to know how Mairi Ban closed the knot on Scarra. Well, nobody closed it. That was the whole trouble.

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She sat on the harbour wall every evening with a bundle of white ribbon her mother had sent over from the mainland, and she worked it round a disc of black slate the size of a cartwheel. Over, under, over, under. The men said she was mad, the minister said she was idle, and the gulls said nothing, because gulls never do. Each night she unpicked the day's work so the ribbon would stay soft for the morning.

Then one February a storm came in off the Atlantic and tore the fishing boats from their moorings, and Mairi's son went out in the last of them. Some say she finished the knot that night to call him back. I say she only stopped unpicking it. The last band passed beneath the first and did not come out the other side, because a knot like that has no end, only places where you lose sight of it. He came home in April, thinner and cursing, having been carried most of three miles on a seal's back.

So when you see her work in the ink, put your finger on a white band and follow it round. You will never find where it starts, and that is the point of it. Go on, try. The tea's stewed, but you'll not be sent out before you've tried.