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. Just a detail — a small fragment taken from The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. He didn’t want the unicorn itself, nor the hunters, nor the violence of the chase. He wanted the fountain. The quiet center.

In the original tapestry, the unicorn kneels beside the fountain, lowering its horn into the water. According to medieval symbolism, the unicorn purifies poisoned water through contact with its horn. It’s 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 you remove the fountain from the full composition, something shifts. It stops being just a fountain within a story. You can still recognize it if you know the reference, but it no longer explains itself. Detached from the unicorn and the hunters, it becomes quieter, more abstract. Less illustrative. It begins to function almost like a symbol without instructions — a shape 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 doesn’t guide the viewer toward a single interpretation. Once isolated, the fountain keeps its calm energy, but it also becomes something more open. Symbolic rather than literal. A fragment rather than a narrative.

It’s not a traditional tattoo motif. And that’s exactly 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. No one knows for certain who commissioned them. They may have been ordered by a noble family. They may have been created as a wedding gift. Their origin is as layered and uncertain as their imagery. Today, they’re housed at The Met Cloisters in New York, and encountering them in person feels less like visiting an exhibition and more like stepping sideways in time.

They’re woven from wool, silk, and silver threads. Every inch is dense with meaning. Plants once believed to neutralize poison. Animals loaded with symbolism. Hunters driven by desire without fully understanding what they’re chasing. And 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 linked to life, renewal, healing, and truth. It marks a threshold — where the natural world meets the spiritual one. A place of pause. Of reflection. Of cleansing. The act of the unicorn purifying the water intensifies that symbolism. 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 to a specific myth alone. It becomes a gesture. A reminder of stillness. Of clarity. Of the possibility that something can remain pure even when surrounded by chaos. Or at least untouched by it.

That’s what this tattoo holds.

Not the hunt.
Not the capture.
But the quiet center — still flowing, still present, long after the rest of the story moves on.

text by noT