Shirtless bearded man with black tribal knotwork tattoos across his left shoulder, upper arm, chest and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal knotwork tattoos on shoulder and chest

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless, bearded man is photographed from the chest up, with black ornamental tattoos covering his left shoulder, upper arm and chest. The designs use bold, looping tribal-style lines and interlaced knotwork, with solid black areas and fine grey shading. The image is almost entirely black and grey, set against a pale, overcast background.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Chest Forearm Tribal Knotwork Scrollwork Ornamental Swirl Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Holme Sluice had been tied with the same knot since before my grandmother's grandmother. Nobody living could say who first looped the hemp, only that the loops ran back on themselves like eels in a wicker trap, and that you never tugged the line the wrong way. Old Tobias Reeve taught me to tie it on a wet morning in March, his fingers thick with cold, and he made me say the turns aloud until I had them by heart: over, under, back through the eye, and never, never cut the tail.

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The trouble came the summer the sluice gates were rebuilt. A man from the drainage board, Mr Harrowgate with his ledger and his pale gloves, decided the old knot was superstition and had the boatmen use an iron shackle instead. For a month the water ran as it always had. Then in August the river came up brown and fast after three days of rain, and the shackle sheared clean through at the first strain, sending the flat-bottomed ferry drifting towards the weir with a child and two sacks of barley aboard.

I was on the far bank with the spare hemp when I saw it go. I made the tail of my own line fast to the bollard in the old way, tied the loops I had learned from Tobias, and threw the coil across the current. The rope held. Hauling it in hand over hand, I felt each turn take the weight and spread it, the way the lines of the old pattern lie across one another so that no single strand bears everything.

When the boat grounded against the reeds, Mr Harrowgate was the first to climb out, soaked to the collar, and he asked me, quite politely, where I had learned such a thing. I told him the river had taught us, and I went home to dry my hands by the fire. The iron shackle went onto the scrap pile the next morning, and the hemp was restrung before the week was out.