Two versions of an interlaced three-lobed Celtic knot design, one in dark green on white and one in cream on dark brown, shown as a flash drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three-lobed Celtic knot design in two colourways

Colour · Flash

The image shows a symmetrical Celtic knot built from three interlaced lobes arranged in a rounded triangular outline. The linework is bold, with over-and-under weaving and even spacing between strands. Two colourways sit side by side: dark green on white on the left, and cream on dark brown on the right.

Celtic knot Knotwork Interlace Triangle Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had drawn the same loop eleven times before the bell for Terce, and eleven times the strand had come back to the wrong side of its partner. Ink dried grey on the vellum. He could hear the sea working at the rocks below the scriptorium wall, and beside him old Father Teague was grinding malachite for the greens as though nothing in the world were amiss.

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"You are counting the overs," Teague said without looking up. "Stop counting. Count the unders."

Osric tried it. A strand goes under, then over, then under again, and at each crossing he had to hold the thought of the one behind it, or the whole thing slid apart. Teague had once told him the knot was a prayer that folded back on itself, three lobes so that no one could say where the praying began. Osric had thought it a pleasant saying and not much more.

On the last morning before the boat came for the copied gospels, he finally closed the third lobe. He did it without thinking, his hand moving the way Teague's did, and when he looked up the sea had gone flat and silver. Teague set down the mortar, studied the sheet for a long while, and said only, "Now you can leave it," which was the nearest thing to praise Osric ever heard from him.