Black line drawing of a heart formed from interlaced ribbon-like Celtic knotwork, with no placement shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced heart knot design

Black and grey · Flash

The image is a black line drawing of a heart built from several looping strands that cross over and under one another, in the manner of Celtic knotwork. The outlines are bold and uniform in weight, with no shading or fill, and the strands form an enclosed heart shape on a plain white background. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with the knot filling most of the frame.

Heart Knot Celtic knot Interlace Knotwork Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of the gale you have stopped counting the knots and started counting the strands. Four lines come up from the winch housing and loop back over the lamp room rail, and each must be bent to the next before the relief boat can make fast. Your father taught you the crossing, two loops passed over and under a third, and the rule that no strand may run straight for long. He said a rope that runs straight is a rope that is waiting to break.

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Nessa brings tea up the iron stairs at six and does not ask about the rope. She sets the enamel mug on the gallery rail and sees the sketch pinned under the barometer, a heart drawn in one unbroken pencil line that goes around itself three times without lifting. 'That's no sailor's knot,' she says. 'No,' you tell her. 'It's the one you tie when you want a thing to hold and you don't want it pulled tight.' She looks at it a long while, then at the sea, and says nothing, which from Nessa is a kind of blessing.

The wind drops at slack water, the way it always does when it has made its point. Below, the Maudlin noses in against the landing, and the boatman throws his line up on the third try. You take it, feed it through the ring, and work the loops until every crossing carries its share of the weight. The strands go taut and settle with a sound like a held breath let out.

Then you climb to the lantern, turn the great lens by hand until the bulb catches, and watch the white arm swing out across the black water, the way it has swung every night since your grandfather first lit it.