Black and grey drawing of a tree of life with interlaced branches, flanked by two wolves and framed by a Celtic knotwork border, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Tree of life with wolves in a Celtic knot circle

Black and grey · Flash

A circular design shows a central tree with knotted roots and branches bearing leaves, flanked on each side by a wolf with an open mouth and scaled body. Fine stippled and hatched linework builds the shading on the tree, animals and knotwork, with bold black areas at the base. The composition is symmetrical within a wide woven Celtic knot border, drawn on plain paper.

Tree of life Wolf Celtic knot Knotwork Root Leaves Branches Border

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knot at the third root had held for nine winters, and my father swore the first king's own hands had tied it, so when the steward sent for me at first frost I took the long iron awl and a lamp and went down beneath the hall of Skarnwick without asking why.

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The wolves were waiting where they always waited, one on each side of the tree, their mouths open on a sound that never came. Grey Ottrun was the elder, her scales worn smooth along the ribs from centuries of leaning against the stone. The steward wanted them loosed. He said the harvest had failed because the roots were bound too tight and the tree could not drink. I told him a tree that could not drink would not still be bearing leaves in the hall above us, and he answered that a king who wished to be answered had better build his own tree.

I worked the awl under the braided cord where three strands crossed and felt it give, slow as a sigh. The wolves did not stir. Ottrun turned her head and looked at me with an eye the colour of old pewter, and I understood she had been waiting for someone with enough patience to pick the knot rather than cut it.

When the last loop slid free, the lamp showed the roots drinking from the dark, and the leaves overhead began to shiver as though a door had opened somewhere above. The wolves had gone into the ring of stone where the border runs. Only the steward's footprints remained in the silt, and mine, climbing the stair with my hands full of cold rope.