I've been meaning to do a Celtic Cross for years - at least since I did my knotwork pentacles - but until I started noodling around with this one I never cared for the layouts I came up with.

The design uses three of the knotwork patterns I designed for my book "Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections" ( [link] ) and I'm not sure whether that was partly a proof of concept, or whether I just saw ways to use the patterns I was working on. Either way, I finally did a cross as my way of offering equal time .

The shape of a Celtic cross is an interesting one - it's based on carved stone crosses which may originally have shown up in Scotland, and the typical ring around the cross seems to have been invented to make the arms of the cross stronger. They were building for the long term in those days.

It's scaled down pretty far from the original, which I did as a 300 DPI image for an 18 x 24" poster. But its bold, large shapes still hold up pretty well.