Full back tattoo of interlaced knotwork and spirals in black, grey and red ink, covering the whole of the upper and lower back.

Full back Norse interlace tattoo

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large full back piece of interlaced knotwork, scrolling bands and spiral forms, with animal-like shapes woven through the design. The linework is bold with grey shading that gives the bands a raised, metallic look. Red fills sit behind sections of the knotwork, with the rest of the piece in black and grey, and the design spans the entire back.

Back Knotwork Interlace Spiral Scrollwork

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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

The silver has gone grey again by the time the lamp is lit, so you sit with the file and the bench and wait for the last bell before you trust your hands. Across the yard the hall is asleep. Only the forge ticks as it cools, and the drawn wire you have been twisting since dusk lies in a loose coil, a serpent that has not yet decided which way to bite.

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Your master, Sigrun, used to say that knotwork is a lie told carefully. Every band looks as though it runs over and under, but it has only one true path, and the smith must find that path before the eye does. You have been finding it for three nights. The first band you laid ran straight through its own tail. The second came out a loop with no end. Tonight you pin the strands to the oak board and press garnet dust, mixed with pitch, into each hollow where the wire turns back on itself.

Near midnight a boy from the ferry road knocks, soaked to the skin, to say the tide has taken the cart and his mother is asking for the smith's lantern. You give him the lantern and not the silver. Walking him to the gate, you see the bands on the board catch the moonlight through the shutter, so they seem to rise off the wood as if hammered up from beneath.

By the time the cart is hauled from the mud and the boy's mother is wrapped in your cloak, the dawn has come up grey over the fjord. You go back to the board. The coil has cooled, its red hollows dark as old wine. You trace the path with one finger. It runs over, under, over, and comes home to the place it began, with nothing left loose.