White line-art design on a black background of two interlaced birds with knotwork patterns and fan-shaped tail feathers, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced twin birds knotwork design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two stylised birds, likely ravens, with their bodies crossed in an X shape and their heads facing outwards. The bodies are filled with interlaced knotwork, spirals and dots in white on black, and the feet end in fan-shaped feather forms. The composition is symmetrical and centred, with bold solid shapes and fine outlines.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only mason left on Skerrow when the ferry stops coming in February, and the old rood stone above the chapel door has split straight through its knot. Mrs Lunan's boy says the birds carved on it are crows. You tell him they are ravens, because you spent a whole summer copying them from a rubbing, and you know a raven's feet spread into fans when it lands against the wind.

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You work through the cold. Chisel, mallet, the slap of the tide on the slipway. The two birds cross at the breast, each neck looped through the other so that lifting one means lifting both. You cut the spirals first and the dots last, because the dots are where your hand rests when you are thinking. Each evening the lamp in the shed burns down before the work is finished, and each morning the frost has crept a little further into the crack.

On the night the wind takes the boat shed roof, you lever the broken half away from the wall and find something under the lichen on its back. Someone scratched letters there in a careful hand: E.M., 1743, and below them, Leave the last loop open for whoever comes after.

At first light the ferry sounds its horn out past the skerry. You fit the stone back with a bed of lime, leave one loop of the knot unpicked, and watch two black birds lift from the chapel roof, their feet spread like fans against the grey sky.

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