Two matching black outline triquetra knot tattoos, one on an upper arm and one on a forearm, with solid black linework and unshaded white interiors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching triquetra knot tattoos on two arms

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching tattoos of an interlocking triquetra, a three-pointed Celtic knot, sit on separate areas of skin. The design is drawn in bold, even black outlines with the interlaced bands left unfilled, so the knot reads as a clean, graphic shape. The tattoos are shown close up, with a blurred indoor background in the top right corner.

Geometric Upper arm Forearm Triquetra Celtic knot Trinity knot Knot Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Morag, the boat is hauled up now and the nets are drying over the wall of the harbour office, so I finally have time to answer your letter properly. You asked how I held the mooring line the night of the squall. I didn't hold it alone. Your father did the real work, sitting on the wet slip with a lantern wedged between his boots while the wind hauled at the hull like a dog with a sock in its teeth.

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The knot he used was the one the old women in Dunstane called the three-hearted loop, where one length of rope passes over and under itself three times and returns to where it started. Pull on any single arc and the whole thing tightens. Cut one and it all falls apart. He drew it for me on the back of a tide table when I was nine, then made me copy it with a stub of carpenter's pencil until my lines stopped wobbling. I still have that table in my oilskin pocket.

Yesterday the Pryce boy came down to the slip asking whether we'd be marking our arms with it, the way the lads in Lerwick mark theirs. I told him a knot is for the rope, not the skin, and he went off laughing. But I sat there a long while after, thinking about how a thing can be one unbroken line and still have three sides to it.

The weather turns Thursday, so I'll tie the spare line off the same way tonight. Tell your mother the boat is safe. Every arc is pulled at once, and that is why it holds.