Two matching black Celtic trinity knot tattoos with swirling tendrils on the forearms of two people with their wrists held together.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching Celtic knot tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two near-identical tattoos of an interlaced Celtic triquetra knot sit on the inner forearms, each with curling tendril lines extending from the knot. The linework is solid black with some shading inside the knot loops, and the design is mirrored slightly between the two arms. The photograph is taken close up against a patterned black and white fabric background.

Forearm Celtic knot Triquetra Trinity knot Swirl Tendril Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the wasps have claimed every windfall in Pennick's orchard, so you and Wenna learn to pick the Victoria plums from the top rungs of the ladder before the bees arrive. Your grandmother stands below with her hands in her apron pocket, counting baskets out loud in Welsh so the numbers sound like a hymn.

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The old tree by the wall is the one she calls the knot. Three grafts of different stock were bound into one trunk the year your grandfather died, each wrapped in strips of flax and tied off with a loop that folds back on itself three times. She says nobody has ever found the end of it. One evening you try, with a penknife and a torch, and lose the thread somewhere under the bark before Wenna laughs at you until she has to sit down in the grass.

Wenna wants to leave for Bristol in September. You want to stay until the first frost. Neither of you says so in the orchard, where the grass hums and the fruit splits sweet in the heat, but you both keep coming back to the knot and tracing it with a fingernail, as if it might tell you which way to go.

On the last picking day your grandmother hands each of you a length of flax and says the knot holds best when two hands pull against a third. You tie it between you, three loops crossing and recrossing, while plums drop into the long grass and bruise where nobody will bother to gather them. When the last knot pulls tight, Wenna's line and yours run together over the old one, and for once neither of you pulls first.