Black ink interlaced knot tattoo with square-looped geometric lines on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced knot on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo of a symmetrical interlaced knot sits on the side of a bare torso. The design is built from rounded, square-cornered loops that cross over and under one another around a central point. It is rendered in solid black ink with a crisp, slightly textured edge, and the background of a wooden shelf and small plant ornament is softly out of focus.

Geometric Blackwork Ribs Knot Interlace Geometric motif Loop Symmetry

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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 knot was already on the church noticeboard when I came back from Hartlow that spring, pinned between a lost-dog card and the bell-ringers' rota. Mrs Probert had drawn it herself in biro, four loops locked around a single square heart, and under it she had written in capitals that anyone who could copy it properly would be paid a shilling a yard for the new rope on the lychgate. Nobody in Dunmere could copy it. We tried on the back of the parish magazine and got a mess of ribbons that looked like a broken fence.

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It was Tom Eyre who got it right, though not in the way anyone expected. He had been a signalman at the junction before his chest went, and he sat at the window of the reading room with a length of tarred cord, feeding it over and under with his thick, patient fingers. He said the trick was never to look at the whole thing. You followed one loop until it came back to where it started, then you went round again. He had learned it from a Welshman who worked the points, who had learned it from a dead man's sketch on the back of a timetable. Every knot, Tom said, was just a road that refused to end.

We hung his finished version over the lychgate in June, black and stiff with tar, the square corners sharp against the blue. People stopped to look at it on their way to evensong. Mrs Probert paid him his shilling a yard and then, to everyone's surprise, the rest of the coil as well. When I asked her why, she only said the thing had been tied properly for once, and a proper knot needed no undoing.