The Fountain and the Unicorn

Tattoo by @notattoo_berlin, made at @visionsofecstasy.studio
Tattooed for @_niklahum

Text by noT

This tattoo was made for @_niklahum and is based on a detail from The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. The reference came from the client, who was already interested in the image. We focused on the fountain: a central element in one of the panels that can easily be overlooked within the larger scene, but becomes very striking once isolated.

In the original tapestry, the unicorn kneels beside the fountain and purifies the water with its horn. Around it, birds, plants, animals, hunters, and symbolic details create a dense and highly elaborate image. Removed from that larger narrative, the fountain takes on a different role. It becomes a quiet, vertical, almost architectural form, carrying a sense of stillness and concentration.

The tapestries were produced around the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, probably in the Southern Netherlands, and are now part of the collection of The Met Cloisters in New York. They are known for their richness of detail and for the way they combine myth, nature, devotion, and symbolic meaning within a single visual world.

For this tattoo, it was not necessary to bring the whole tapestry. The fountain alone was enough. It holds something of the atmosphere of the original image — stillness, purification, and mystery — while functioning clearly on the body as its own composition.

What interested me in this tattoo was precisely that shift: taking a small medieval fragment and allowing it to stand on its own. Removed from the larger hunt, the fountain becomes a self-contained image, quieter and more focused, but still connected to the world it comes from.

A fountain.
A unicorn.
A still centre within a larger story.

noT