Grey and muted-colour drawing of a Green Man face made of leaves, set within Celtic interlace knotwork and two stylised animal heads, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green Man with Celtic knotwork design

Mixed · Flash

A Green Man face, formed from layered leaves and vines, sits at the centre of a dense frame of Celtic interlace knotwork. Two stylised animal heads, one at the top left and one at the top right, and a third at the bottom right, are woven into the knots. The drawing is shaded in grey with fine pencil-like hatching, with small touches of muted green and brown in the leaves.

Celtic knot Interlace Leaves Vine Animal head Dragon Foliage Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke. You'll want to hear how the Green Man came down to Maud Tarrant's garden wall the spring the Aldous boys tore out the hedge. Nobody had asked him to come. He came anyway, the way damp comes up through a cellar floor, and by the first week of April the ivy had found the gate latch and the mint had swallowed the path.

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Maud went out with her shears and a bad temper, and she found him sitting on the coping stone with a face like a knot of oak roots, leaves spilling out of his mouth and his eyebrows. Two stone beasts lay coiled in the brambles beside him, their heads turned to watch her, and a third slept under the rhubarb with its tail wound round the bean poles. They were all knotted together, every one of them, so you could not tell where the creatures stopped and the tangle started.

"You've let the wall go," he said. His voice was rain running off slates. "Who is going to hold the roots if you don't?"

She told him that she'd held nothing but a mortgage and a husband's coat for thirty years. He laughed, and a sparrow flew out of his beard. So she sat down on the step with him and they argued it out until the light went copper. By the end she had agreed to cut back the bindweed on the Tuesdays and leave the wild rose be, and he had agreed to keep the Aldous boys from crossing the lawn with their bicycles.

The next morning the wall was whole, every stone set back like a tooth, and the three beasts were nowhere to be seen, though Maud swore she found a single curl of green wire pressed into the soil by her back door, shaped exactly like the knot that holds a gate shut.