Square Knot Tattoo Meaning
Agreement, security, mutual hold, and a bond that needs both sides to pull.
The reef knot has been tied the same way for at least four thousand years.
A square knot — two overhand knots tied in opposite directions — appears in the archaeological record of ancient Egypt: a fragment of rope from approximately 1500 BCE, tied in a reef knot, preserved in the dry climate of the Nile Valley. The same knot that sailors use to reef a sail, that surgeons use to tie sutures, that hikers use to join two ropes of equal diameter, that children learn as the first knot, that every person who has ever tied a package has probably tied — unchanged for four millennia.
Ashley's Book of Knots (1944) — the definitive encyclopedia of knots, containing 3,900 entries — lists the square knot as number 1204 and notes that it is the most widely used knot in the world and also one of the most frequently tied incorrectly. The granny knot — the square knot's treacherous twin, produced when both overhand knots go in the same direction — looks almost identical and holds far worse. It slips under load. The difference between the knot that holds and the knot that fails is which way the second half crosses.
Hercules tied his lion-skin cloak with a square knot. The 'Hercules knot' — the square knot — was adopted by Greek and Roman tradition as the knot of strength and fidelity. Roman brides wore a girdle tied in a Hercules knot that the groom untied on the wedding night — the knot of Hercules, undone by the husband, the symbol of the bond that required specific permission and skill to release.
The square knot is the democratic knot: universally useful, universally accessible, universally tied wrong by people who are in a hurry.
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