Black ink drawing of a triquetra Celtic knot surrounded by calligraphic swirls and dots, shown as a tattoo design on white paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Triquetra knot with calligraphic swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A single triquetra, formed of three interlaced loops, sits at the centre of the design, with tapered calligraphic swirls and small dots radiating outwards. The linework is bold and solid black on a plain white background, with no shading. The composition is centred and open, with the flourishes extending to the edges of the drawing.

Triquetra Celtic knot Swirl Dot Interlace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last up train had gone through Hollin Cross without stopping, and Mabel Crane was still watching the rain run down her signal box window when the stranger knocked. He had a folded map in his coat, drawn in black ink, and he unfolded it on her levers as though he owned the junction. Three lines curled together in the middle, looping over and under one another, with a tail of ink flicking off each end. Which way does it go round? he asked. All of them, she said, if you are patient enough to wait for the third.

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Her gran had told her the old tale when she was small. Three sisters once stood at a crossroads and would not part, so each took a loop of the others' hands and bound them tight, and no sister could leave without pulling the other two after her. They walked the knot for so long that the road wore into rails, and the rails wore into the swirls that still curl off the edge of every timetable. The little dots, her gran said, were the sisters' footprints, pressed into the cinders where they had paused to argue.

The stranger folded the map and set a farthing on the sill with a hole worn through its middle. He said he would take the sisters' road to the sea, and that he would be back when the knot came round. Mabel wrote the date in her logbook and put a dot beside it, the way she did for every train that passed without stopping.

In the morning there were three dots more than there had been the night before, and the farthing was gone. Mabel pulled the points lever, felt the iron shift and lock, and heard the three lines hum as they took the weight of the first train, bound together as neatly as the sisters had ever been.