Black tribal and Celtic knotwork design of a six-pointed star with a braided circle at its centre, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six-pointed tribal and knotwork star design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical six-pointed star built from tribal motifs and interlaced knotwork, with a braided Celtic-style ring at the centre. The design is drawn in solid black linework with dense patterned fills and open white areas. It is shown flat and centred on a plain white background.

Blackwork Star Knotwork Celtic knot Tribal Circle Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The braided ring on the lamp-room floor had been there since my grandmother's time, a circle of iron rope the keepers laid to mark the place where the lens sat true. Nobody swept around it. Mrs Pryce from the chandlery came up the cliff path every Thursday with a loaf and the Gazette, and she always stepped over the ring without looking down, the way you step over a sleeping dog.

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It was Mrs Pryce who told me about the six points. Her husband had drawn them for her on the back of a tide table, a star with hooked arms, each arm wound with tangled knots that never quite ended. Six for the six harbour lights that used to guide the herring boats in before the breakwater went up, she said, and the seventh was the hole in the middle where the boats were supposed to come home to. I thought it was a story to keep a widow company. Then in February the fog came in thick for nine days and the foghorn on the south mole cracked, and I went down the iron stair with a torch to see what the sea had done to the rocks.

I found a skiff tangled in the kelp below the point, its lantern still lit and its oars shipped neatly as if the men had only paused to rest. I towed it in on the flood. When I climbed back up, the lamp-room was blazing bright through the glass, though I had left it dark. I stood in the doorway a long while, counting the knots in the ring, and the light turned slowly through six sweeps of the beam until it came to rest in the centre, exactly where the boats had always been meant to find their way home.