Pencil sketch of a tattoo design: two stylised animal heads face each other to form a heart, with Celtic knotwork braids and scroll ornament below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knotwork heart with two animal heads

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a heart shape made from two stylised animal heads facing each other at the top, with their bodies curving into the outline. The heart is filled with interlaced Celtic knotwork braiding, and a tribal-style scroll ornament with a tapering tail extends downwards from its base. The linework is grey and sketchy with light shading, and faint crosshair guide lines run through the page.

Heart Animal head Knotwork Scroll Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Crane pressed her thumb into the wax of the second mould and felt it give like cold butter. The frost had not yet lifted off the reeds at Holm Sallow, and her uncle's furnace would not hold heat past noon. Whatever she meant to make of the two beasts had to be finished before the parish men came to collect the commission.

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The commission was a pair of gate finials for the church of St Edwin, to face each other across the lych gate. Her uncle had drawn them as horses, but Ada had dreamed them as something with longer jaws and knotted manes, beasts that curled back into themselves the way a braid does when a girl is too proud to let it loose. She cut the braiding into the wax with a bone tool, over and under, the way her mother taught her to weave eel-boat rope.

On the last night the heat came up strong and the wax wept away from the beasts' brows. Ada sat on an upturned crate with her palms burned raw and watched the metal glow. Her uncle came down the steps with his lamp and looked at the pair of them lying in the sand bed, muzzle to muzzle, with a gap between their jaws just wide enough for a wren.

"They'll never sit apart now," he said. "Not once they're hung." She didn't answer. By morning the scroll tails had cooled to a dark bronze, tapering down into the ground like smoke that refused to leave the forge. Some of the village children still say that if you stand in the lych gate at dusk and look through the gap between the beasts, you can see a small red heart where the two mouths almost touch.