Black line drawing of a triquetra, a three-part interlaced knot made of pointed arcs, shown as a standalone design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Triquetra trinity knot design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a single triquetra, a three-part Celtic knot formed from three interlocking pointed arcs with a continuous over-and-under weave. It is drawn as a solid black outline with even line weight and no shading. The design is centred on a plain white background, with no skin, body part or colour besides black.

Triquetra Trinity knot Celtic knot Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mallory sisters never agreed on the price of coal, the state of the stairs or whose turn it was to fetch the milk from the dairy at the top of the cliff road. They agreed on one thing only, and that was the rope. Their father had tied it round the boarding house gatepost the winter the boats stopped coming in. He had knotted it in a loop with the end run back over and under itself three times, so that no one could pull the loop apart without first lifting the whole length off the post.

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Lodgers came and went through that summer. A widower from Leeds paid a week in advance and slept with his boots on. A girl from the munitions works counted the spoons every morning and found them all there. Each evening the sisters walked the rope down to the slipway, one at a time, and each time they climbed back up it they had less to say about each other.

In September a stranger with a canvas bag asked for a room facing the sea. Edith, the eldest, gave him the front room because it had the best view and the worst draught. He asked about the knot. Nobody had ever asked about the knot before. She told him their father had said it was a promise made three ways, so that none of them could break it alone.

The stranger laughed and said that was a sailor's answer. He untied nothing, paid for two nights and left the bag behind. Inside was a length of the same rope, cut clean, and a note in careful pencil: the loop holds as long as one of you stands at each point. That evening the sisters went down to the slipway and found they could not stand on the same stone without touching, and for the first time in years none of them argued about who should go first.