Black line drawing of a symmetrical interlaced knot with four loops forming a cross shape, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four-loop interlaced knot design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a single black line drawing of a symmetrical knot, with four loops arranged around a central crossing to form a cross-like shape. The linework is even and of uniform weight, with the strands crossing over and under each other at the centre and at each loop. The design is in solid black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Geometric Knot Interlace Loop Cross Line drawing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, because the fire only warms the front of you, and this tale wants your back warmed too. Sixty winters back, when the drifts came up to the eaves of this very house, a rope-maker called Tobias Penhale came over the pass with a mule and not much sense. He carried a coil of tarred hemp meant for the ferryman at Lowmere, and he had promised to deliver it before the river froze.

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The snow shut the road behind him, so he stayed. Every evening he sat where you're sitting and worked the hemp with his thumbs, crossing one strand over, then under, then over again, until a shape came out of it: four loops turning around a single crossing, like a cross somebody had drawn with a breath. The innkeeper's daughter, Nell, asked him why he never cut the line. 'Because a knot that is cut has nowhere left to go,' he said. 'This one only comes back to where it started, and it is never the same twice.'

On the ninth morning a boy came up from the river with word that the ice had gone grey and the ferry would run again. Tobias ran for the stable and found the mule gone into the white. Nell didn't wait for her father. She unpicked his knot from the hearth-stone, fed the hemp out into a long lead, and tied one end to the sledge. They found the mule at the bend, knee-deep and stubborn. In the morning, when the snow had gone blue, the only marks left in the yard were two sets of runners, and on the stone by the fire lay the shape of a cross, loops open, waiting to be tied again.