Black tribal knotwork tattoo of an interlaced animal inside a circle on the upper back, with a tribal sun design at the top right edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced animal knotwork across the upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black ink design on a person's upper back shows an interlaced animal figure, possibly a beast with a head and body, inside a ring. Spiral and scroll ornaments fill the solid black areas, and thin outlines carry the knotwork loops around the circle. A bold tribal sun motif sits at the top right edge of the frame, and the image contains no colour.

Back Knotwork Animal Circle Spiral Tribal Sun Interlace Scroll

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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 by the bean rows where the sun can't reach you, and mind the marrow leaves. No, not there, that's where Grandfather buried the dog. Now listen, because this is the one about the beast in the ring and the sun that wanted its spirals.

Keep reading

Long before the church bell came over the water, a creature lived inside a circle of blackthorn at the bottom of Hallow Field. Its body was knotted like the roots of an old ash, every loop crossing over and under itself so nobody could say where it began. The villagers left it bread and milk, and it left them dew on their cabbages, which is more than most neighbours give you.

One midsummer a girl called Ysolde Pennick went out with a spade to dig up a ring her mother had lost. She found the circle instead, and the beast was awake, lying with its jaw on its own front paw. It was crying. It told her the sun had come down one night and peeled the scrolls from its flanks to make rays across the sky, and until the last of them came home, the beast could not lift its head.

Ysolde didn't argue. She knelt in the wet grass, pressed her thumb into the moss where the spirals had been, and sang the old counting song her mother used for churning butter, one, two, three, back to the beast. Somewhere up in the blue, a ray went quiet and folded itself back in. The beast lifted its head, and the next morning the sun came up a shade smaller, and the cabbages were heavy with dew.