The Hunt of the Unicorn.

12 Oct

A tattoo inspired by a quiet moment from a 15th-century tapestry

I made this tattoo for @_niklahum.

He came to me with a very clear idea. Not a full scene, not a dramatic image, but a detail: a small fragment taken from The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. He did not want the unicorn itself, the hunters, or the violence of the chase. He wanted the fountain. The quiet centre.

In the original tapestry, the unicorn kneels beside the fountain and lowers its horn into the water. According to medieval symbolism, the unicorn could purify poisoned water through contact with its horn. It is a moment of calm suspended inside a larger narrative of pursuit and capture. Everything around it is charged with movement and tension, but the fountain remains still. That contrast was essential: stillness surrounded by action, silence inside noise.

That was the feeling we wanted to keep.

When the fountain is removed from the full composition, something changes. It stops functioning only as one element within a story. The reference remains visible for those who know it, but the image no longer explains itself completely. Detached from the unicorn and the hunters, the fountain becomes quieter and more abstract. Less illustrative, more symbolic. A fragment carrying meaning without declaring it.

That separation was intentional. In tattooing, not everything needs to be explained. Sometimes an image becomes stronger when it withholds part of its story, when it refuses to guide the viewer toward a single interpretation. Isolated from the tapestry, the fountain keeps its calm energy, but it also becomes more open. A symbol without instructions. A fragment rather than a narrative.

That is what made it interesting to me.

The original tapestries were woven in the late 15th or early 16th century, most likely in the Southern Netherlands. Their exact origin remains uncertain. They may have been commissioned by a noble family, and they may have been created as a wedding gift. Today, they are housed at The Met Cloisters in New York, where encountering them in person feels less like visiting an exhibition and more like stepping sideways in time.

They are woven from wool, silk, and silver threads, and every part of the surface is dense with meaning: plants once believed to neutralise poison, animals loaded with symbolism, hunters driven by desire without fully understanding what they are pursuing. In the middle of all that density, the fountain remains the quiet heart of the composition.

Fountains have always carried symbolic weight. Across cultures, water is connected to life, renewal, healing, reflection, and truth. It marks a threshold between the physical and the spiritual, between the visible world and something less easily named. In the tapestry, the unicorn purifying the water intensifies that meaning: something wild touching something sacred, something raw transforming what others depend on to survive.

By isolating the fountain, that idea becomes less narrative and more personal. It no longer belongs only to a medieval story. It becomes a gesture: a reminder of stillness, clarity, and the possibility that something can remain intact even when surrounded by tension.

That is what this tattoo holds.

Not the hunt. Not the capture. Not the violence of the story. Just the quiet centre — still flowing, still present, long after the rest of the narrative has moved on.