Grey and green tattoo of a Claddagh with a crown, heart and hands, a Celtic triquetra knot and green ivy leaves on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Claddagh with ivy and Celtic knot on an arm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a Claddagh motif with a crown above a heart held by two hands, with a Celtic triquetra knot above it. Green ivy leaves and curling vines wrap around the outer edge of the design. The Claddagh and knot are shaded in grey with dark outlines, while the leaves are filled in green, set against a plain skin background.

Botanical Forearm Crown Heart Hand Triquetra Celtic knot Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Doherty came up from Galway in 1971 with a ring wrapped in a handkerchief and a cutting of ivy in a jam jar, and she never went anywhere without either. By the time I moved onto the ninth floor of Ferndale House the ivy had been climbing the south face for thirty years, and the council had sent a letter about it every spring since the Jubilee.

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"They'll take it off the wall when I'm in the ground," she said, passing me a mug of stewed tea across the balcony rail. "And then they'll see what the roots did to the mortar."

Her son Declan came round with a ladder and a pair of loppers the week the letter said final notice. He stood in her kitchen with his cap in his hands and said the ivy was bringing the brickwork down, and she said the brickwork had been coming down since 1966 and the ivy was the only thing holding it together. Nobody won that argument. He cut the vines at ground level and left the top, where they had reached the tenth floor and hung over the lift shaft like a green flag nobody had asked for.

Three weeks later I found a sprig rooted in a yoghurt pot on my windowsill, one heart-shaped leaf pressed flat against the glass, and a note in her looping hand: turn the heart in when you're home, love. I didn't understand until the next morning, when her door stood open on the landing and the ring lay on the ledge beside the pot, its heart turned inward, the way she wore it when she had already given her hand away.