Stylised sword with Celtic knotwork

Colour · Flash

A vertical, sword-like symbol with a long blade, crossguard and curled pommel, drawn with bold yellow outlines on a plain black background. Each section is filled with flat colour that shifts from blue at the top through green and purple to orange and red at the base, with interlaced knotwork, a small tree-like motif and a creature figure inside. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with small clusters of dots placed around the figure.

Sword Knotwork Celtic knot Tree Creature Spiral Dot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blade had been lying in the bog for three winters before Orla's brother hauled it out with a hay fork. It was longer than a man's arm and the colour of a bruised plum where the peat had not touched it, and when the sun came through the rain the knotwork on the crossguard seemed to turn over like eels under water. Her brother wanted to sell it to the traveller from Dunmore. Orla said nothing and went up the hill to the castle with its roof gone and its windows full of ivy.

Keep reading

Inside the old hall a tree had grown up through the floor, a thin ash with silver bark, and a white hound lay under it with its chin on its paws. The hound lifted its head when she came in. It did not bark. It looked at the sword in her hands the way a woman looks at a letter she has been expecting for years.

She set the blade point down in the flagstones, as her grandmother had told her a thing must be set when it is to be given back. The coloured bands ran from blue at the hilt to red at the point, and where they met there were little clusters of dots on the stone, though nobody had painted them there. Somewhere below the castle the bog gave a long, slow sigh, the way it did before a new drowning.

She asked the hound what the sword was for. The hound got up, walked three slow circles around the ash, and lay down again. Orla waited until the light moved across the floor, then she took her brother's hay fork and broke it over her knee, and went home to tell him the sword had chosen to stay where it was.