Two fingers with green Celtic knotwork band tattoos wrapping around each finger, one on the middle finger and one on the adjacent finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green Celtic knot bands on two fingers

Hand · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows two fingers, each with a band of Celtic knotwork tattooed around it in a single shade of green. The linework is even and continuous, with interlaced loops forming a braided pattern, and the bands sit side by side with a small gap between them. The image is a close crop on a skin-toned background, with the fingers filling most of the frame.

Hand Celtic knot Knotwork Band Ring Finger

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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 down, the rain's only resting, and you'll hear better from under the arch. You want the story of the knot-smith's rings. My nan told it to me under these same railway arches, when the buskers had packed their cases and the last trains were grinding off towards Stockport. Listen close, because the knot doesn't care for interruptions.

Keep reading

There were two girls in a Salford street, Nell and Bridie, who shared one thin rope of green wool from the rag market. Every night after the mill bell they plaited it over and under the banister of their landing, and every morning their mother unpicked it, because wool is cheap but mornings are not. So Nell went to old Tomas the smith by the canal, who owed her nan a favour, and asked for a knot that would hold. He heated a length of copper, bent it into a band, and told her that a knot which loops back on itself has no end to find, so nobody can pull the ends and let it go.

Tomas made two bands, one for each girl, and they kept them in a biscuit tin under the stairs, taking them out only when the streets went quiet. Years later, when Bridie had gone south for work and the letters came thinner, Nell found her band warm in her apron pocket on a winter night, though the tin had never left the house. That's the trick of a true loop, my nan said. You can carry it a long way, and it always comes back to where it started.