Black and grey tattoo of a boar built from Celtic interlace and spirals, shaded to look raised, sitting on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knotwork boar on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a boar-like animal in profile, with its body formed from looping Celtic knotwork and spiral scrollwork. The outline is bold and the bands are shaded with light and dark greys to give a raised, three-dimensional look. The design runs from the snout across the body and fades into knotwork at the rear, filling the upper arm and shoulder area.

Traditional Upper arm Animal Celtic knot Knotwork Spiral Interlace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boar came down to the ferry crossing every autumn, when the river ran low and brown over the stones. Old Brannoc said it had been doing so since before the bargemen had names, and that it never drank, only stood at the water's edge with its head low, watching the lanterns of the barges go by.

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The spring the flood took Mared's husband, she brought her own barge down the Teme alone, with a sack of barley and a cracked pot of tallow. She was not a woman for stories. When the boar stepped out of the willows at dusk and stood across her bow, she did not shout. She sat on the coaming and waited, the way her father had taught her to wait for a bad-tempered mule.

The beast did not charge. It turned its head so she could see the knots threaded through its shoulder, looping back on themselves, spiralling out where the bristles should have been, and she understood it was a thing made of tying and untying, of roads that doubled back and rivers that never quite reached the sea. Then it walked into the shallows and the water parted around its legs like cloth.

She followed it across, low in the water, and the barge came out on the far bank with no hole in its hull and no weight lost. Mared never said what she had been carrying that trip. She only said that every autumn after, she left a little barley on the stones at the crossing, and every autumn the sack was lighter in the morning.