A flash sheet of black line-drawn knot, swirl and ornamental tattoo designs on white paper, with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knot and swirl line flash sheet

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of small black ink designs on white paper, including interlaced knots, spirals, hearts, crosses and vertical swirling motifs arranged in loose rows. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the designs are drawn in solid black on a plain white ground. The sheet rests on a black and white patterned background, and no body part is visible.

Fine line Knot Swirl Spiral Heart Cross Ornament Flash sheet

Find an artist for this

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 where the lamp reaches your hands, boy, and stop worrying that quill as if it owes you money. Look at the margin of this psalter. I drew every one of these knots the winter my hand shook after the fever. Thin lines and no shading, because shading is for men who want to be admired. A knot only asks to be followed to its end. You set the nib at one loop and follow it, over and under, until you come home to where you began, and your breathing comes back with you.

Keep reading

The novice Tobias asked why so many were left open, their ends trailing down the page like dropped thread. The old man laughed through his nose. 'Those are not failures. A closed knot is a prayer finished, and the brothers who finished theirs are singing in the choir above us. The open ones are for people still walking toward the door. You leave a gap so they can find their way in.' He tapped a spiral near the foot of the sheet. 'That one is for Ruth from Cutter's Lane, who sold us eels for forty years and never once cheated the scale.'

When the Abbot came in spring with the bishop's clerk and saw the sheet pinned to the scriptorium wall, he frowned at the crosses and the little hearts. 'Idle decoration,' he said. Anselm only shrugged and asked him to count the knots. The Abbot counted forty-three, then forty-four, and stopped frowning.

That night Tobias sat alone and inked a knot he had seen only in a dream. At the last loop he did not close it. He lifted the nib and left a hair's width of white between the lines, then blew on the ink until it dried. By morning the page was still open, waiting for someone to finish it.