Black and grey drawing of a tall Norse-style design with interlaced knotwork, a central round knot, a sword-like form and stylised animal heads, shown on plain paper.

Norse knotwork and beast design

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical drawing of an interlaced design built around a central round knot, with a sword-like blade at the top and a braided column running down the middle. Stylised animal heads with curling beaks and eyes sit among the ribbon-like knotwork, and the linework is clean with shaded, rounded forms. The design is rendered in black and grey on a pale background, with the composition filling a tall, narrow panel.

Knotwork Interlace Animal head Serpent Bird Sword Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wind, for it comes up this pass the way a bad debt comes back to a man's door. My grandmother told me this one and hers told her, so it is true enough to carry over the snow. There was a smith called Ketil Harrowgate who kept his forge under the Skarð ridge, where the ravens sat on the cairns and watched the traders go past as if they were counting coins. His one commission he could not refuse. It came from a widow whose son had gone over the pass with a load of salt and had not come back.

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He worked three winters on the blade. The bar was black bog iron from the south, and he folded it until it held a thousand fine lines, then cut the knot into the grip from the inside out, so no one could tell where the first loop began. Each evening the ribbons seemed to tighten a little more under his hammer, and he swore the two serpents at the crossguard turned their heads to watch him work. When he quenched it, the steam rolled up the valley and every raven on the cairns lifted at once.

He would not sell it. He told the widow to walk the pass at dawn and let the blade pull her where it wanted, for iron that has been folded that many times remembers the road it was made to find. She went up with the sword held loose in her hand, and the wind dropped as she climbed. At the top, under a cairn with a ring of ravens' feathers, she found her son's boots and his salt sack, still dry, and beside them a wooden knot he had carved to tell her he was safe on the far side.

That is all the story has, and the ravens still sit on the cairns, counting. Mind the wind on your way down.