Bold black tribal tattoo with a red and grey Celtic knot circle on a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Tribal and Celtic knot upper arm tattoo

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tribal design covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on a circular Celtic knot filled with red and left in grey. The surrounding black swirls and sweeping blade-like shapes are solid and heavy, with clean edges and little shading. The shirtless subject is photographed from the side against a pale wall, with the design filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Tribal Celtic knot Circle Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrow Point could say when the wind first learned the stairwell. It came up from the car park on the cold nights, sliding past the bins and the broken lift, and it climbed the concrete stairs one landing at a time until it reached the top floor. There it found the door of Mrs Agnes Doyle, who kept a red enamel bowl on her sill and a length of old string on the hook beside it.

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The wind wanted the bowl. It rattled the glass and hissed under the frame, and it told her that the flats below were empty, that her husband had gone down those same stairs and never come back up. Agnes did not answer. She took the string from the hook and began to knot it, over and under, the way her grandmother had taught her on a farm in Mayo, circle inside circle, until the loop had no beginning and no end.

By morning she had a ring the size of a dinner plate. She hung it in the stairwell at the height of a man's shoulder and tied the red bowl to its centre with a single loop. The wind came up in the dark and reached the knot, and it went round and round the ring, looking for the place where the string began. It never found it. At dawn it gave up and slid back down past the bins, and the lift, which had been broken for nine years, gave a shudder and began to hum.

The children of the block still pass the ring on their way to school. None of them knows who made it, and none of them tries to untie the knot, because the red bowl is filled with sand and geraniums every spring, somebody always tends it, and the wind has not been seen above the fourth floor since.