Black and white photo of two people holding hands, each with a black Celtic knot tattoo on the forearm, geometric in style.

Matching Celtic knots on two forearms

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with similar black Celtic interlace knot tattoos, one on each arm, both sitting on the outer forearm. The linework is solid and bold with some interior detail in the knot loops, and the design is shown in black ink only. The composition is a black and white close view of the two arms and joined hands against a light background.

Geometric Forearm Celtic knot Knot Interlace Hand Holding hands Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knot had been tied by Brannoc the rope-maker on the morning the tide took his boat, and he had never once let it come undone. Nessa kept hers in the salt room under the broken keep of Carrig Dun, where the wind came through the arrow slits like a long complaint. Every spring the two of them walked the cliff path to the cairn and set their wrists together over the stone, the way their grandmothers had shown them, so the interlace could be checked against the other. Thread had frayed, the story went, in the years of the great storm, and the knots had been re-sewn from a single length of flax that never once broke.

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That spring the cairn was wet and the flax would not hold. Nessa sat on the cold step of the keep with her sleeve pushed up and the old pattern drawn on her skin in soot and gall, while Brannoc's hand covered hers and turned it slowly, as if he were feeling for a fault in a hull. He found none. He found only the place where the loops crossed over and under each other, four times, and came back to where they began.

They pressed their arms together until the marks smudged into one another. Below them the sea worked at the rocks, patient as a clerk. "It doesn't end," Nessa said, "it only goes round." Brannoc laughed, and the sound went up through the broken roof and out over the water, and somewhere a gull answered it. The knots were still there in the morning, dark and whole, and that was the only proof anyone in the village ever needed.