Grey interlaced knotwork design with spiral scrolls running down a tall vertical strip, drawn as a line illustration on a white background with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced knotwork strip design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a tall vertical strip of interlaced knotwork built from looping bands that cross over and under one another. Spiral scrolls sit at the ends of many of the bands and along the edges of the strip. The linework is bold and dark, filled with flat mid-grey on a plain white background, and the design repeats in a symmetrical column from top to bottom.

Knotwork Interlace Spiral Scroll Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the candle, because Brother Tadhg never liked a draught near his vellum. You'll have heard that the abbey at Inishcarra was built to keep the sea off the cattle. That's a lie told by men who wanted the tithes. The truth is it was built to keep a border straight.

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Brother Tadhg was given the Gospel of the Seven Wells to finish, and he had one season and a pot of iron-gall ink that thickened every time the bell rang. Every page wanted a strip down its edge, and every strip had to knot back on itself with no end showing, or the Lord would see the join and the book would be cursed. He tried for a full winter. Each morning he drew a band, and each evening the band had come undone in his sleep, the loops slipping over and under like eels in a bucket.

It was the abbot's mule that fixed it. The beast got into the scriptorium one night, ate half a column of spirals, and left wet hoofprints through the lamp oil. Tadhg swore at it, then stopped, because the scrolls it had nibbled curled off the page like fern fronds. He let each loop turn back on itself at the end, a little curl, and the knot held.

So when you see that strip running down a page, count the spirals. Seven at the top, seven at the bottom, and one curl nobody can account for. That one's the mule's. Now, who wants the next story, and who's taking the candle?