Black line drawing of a Norse-style interlaced knotwork design with a stylised animal head at the upper right, shown as a tattoo design on paper with no body part visible.

Norse interlace beast knotwork design

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an interlaced knotwork design, with a stylised animal head with a pointed snout and ear-like curls at the upper right. The body of the beast weaves through a dense tangle of ribbon-like bands, with spiral terminals at the edges. The drawing is uncoloured and shown on a plain pale background, with even line weight throughout.

Knotwork Interlace Animal Beast Dragon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman's boy had been told never to touch the carved prow, but on the morning the fog came up off the Humber he laid his palm on the beast's knotted throat anyway, because it was the only thing in the yard that looked as if it had been waiting. The ribbons under his hand were cold and smooth, worn by a century of rope and rain. Somewhere beneath the tangle, Old Ragna said, the creature had once been a wolf, and before that a wolf's idea of a river.

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He had come to the yard to learn caulking, not stories, but Ragna talked while she worked, her mallet ringing against oakum. She said the beast's head kept turning back to see whether the bands that bound it were still holding. As long as they held, it would keep its place at the front of the boat and keep the sea from taking the crew. The spiral curls at its edges, she said, were where the loose ends were tucked, and a careless hand could pull one free.

That night the wind swung north and the boat was launched with the fog still lying on the water. The boy stood at the prow, watching the beast's pointed snout cut the grey, and he counted the loops over and under as the knots slid past. When the bank finally dissolved behind them he saw that the curls at the edge had all been pulled tight, and that the ribbon he had touched that morning had been mended in the dark.