Two hands with matching black Celtic knot band tattoos wrapped around the ring fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching Celtic knot bands on two ring fingers

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest one over the other, each with a small black tattoo of an interlaced Celtic knot encircling the ring finger. The knotwork is outlined in dark ink with solid shading, and the two bands sit at similar angles on the fingers. The image is in greyscale with a patterned dark fabric behind the hands, and the tattoos are the clear focus of the frame.

Hand Celtic knot Interlace Ring Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came over the pass a week early, and the drovers sheltered at the lower inn with their mules stamping in the yard. You sit on the step with a length of tarred hemp across your knees, working the strands over and under the way your aunt taught you, until the pattern closes on itself and there is no end to find. Tomas watches from the doorway with his cap pulled low. He has not spoken to his brother Rhys since the spring sheep sale, and he wants to know why you are wasting daylight on a knot nobody will see from the road.

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You do not answer him straight away. You cut the cord into two equal lengths, then join each into a band no wider than a finger, pulling the interlace tight with your teeth until the loops lie flat and the same. 'It is for Rhys,' you say at last. 'Take it up to the cairn at noon. He will be there, because he always is.' Tomas turns the band in his fingers. It is the same band on both sides, you tell him, and the knot has no start, so neither of them can claim to have begun the quarrel.

At noon the sleet thins and two figures stand at the cairn, one from each side of the pass. Neither moves for a long while. Then Tomas steps forward and holds out his hand, the band across his palm, and Rhys takes his own from inside his coat and lays it against it. The cords catch and turn, one through the other, and neither will come apart without the other. Far below, the mules start down the track with their bells going, and the spare hemp is still coiled on the inn step where you left it.