Black and grey interlace knotwork tattoo on a back, showing a tree above two serpent heads and a triquetra at the base, in Blackwork style.

Knotwork tree and beasts across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers most of the upper back with a symmetrical design of interlaced knotwork, a tree with a braided trunk at the top, and two serpent or dragon heads at the upper corners. Beneath the tree sit two interlaced animal heads, and a triquetra knot sits at the base. Heavy solid black areas sit behind the pale linework, with fine grey shading giving depth, and the photo is taken straight on with even light.

Blackwork Back Tree Knotwork Serpent Dragon Animal head Triquetra Interlace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Vaddersvik would whistle at the wheelhouse door of the Kittiwake, not since old Hakon cut the knotwork into it with a gouge the winter his brother drowned. He said the tree was there to hold the boat to the ground, that the two serpents at the corners were the tides, one coming in and one going out, and that a man who whistled would hear them arguing all the way to the fishing grounds.

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I was seventeen the February the engine quit off Ronas Holm, with the sea standing up grey and the light going. Sigurd, who had never once listened to a word his father said, went white and reached for the braided hawser on the foredeck. He said nothing. He just began to tie the old marlinespike knot the way Hakon had taught him, over and under, until the strands ran into one another like the trunk above the door, and the bow came round into the swell and stayed there.

Forty minutes later the diesel coughed, caught, and we limped home past the pier lights with the wind dropping behind us. Nobody spoke of it at the fish market. Sigurd stood a long while at the wheelhouse door before he went in, and when I went to coil the rope in the hold I saw he had looped the spare end around the carved trunk and knotted it there, a knot nobody would ever have to untie.