Nordic

On YokoFolio, pick the style Nordic and then your city, and widen the radius if you need to. Look at two things: airy interlace, whose over-and-under passes you can still follow once healed, and — if you want runes — an artist who has them checked rather than transcribing them letter by letter. A portfolio showing real sources, runestones or the portals of stave churches, is a good sign. Healed photos matter here, because tight knots and small runes are the first things to blur. When you contact the artist from their profile, ask which Viking-age style they draw from and who will check the runes.

Thor's hammer protects; the raven points to Odin and his knowledge; the wolf to strength and to Fenrir; the world tree Yggdrasil links the nine worlds. The runes, though, are first of all an alphabet: they write sounds, and the esoteric meanings attached to them are largely modern reconstructions. Some favorites are also younger than they look: the vegvísir and the Ægishjálmur come from Icelandic grimoires far later than the Viking age. For people who practice the Norse faith today, these symbols carry religious meaning. Several of them, including isolated runes, have been taken up by far-right groups: the valknut is one, and the black sun, often passed off as Norse, is a Nazi-era design. Read up on what you're wearing — it's a real issue, and artists in this style know it well.

The raven, the wolf, the bear, the Midgard serpent, the world tree Yggdrasil, the hammer, the ship, the vegvísir or the Ægishjálmur. Interlaced stretched animals, in the Urnes style, make beautiful armbands, and gods and warriors work too, drawn in the flat, stylized manner of Viking art. If you want an inscription in runes, have it read over by someone who works with Old Norse, not by an online converter: going letter by letter from English almost always produces a string of signs that means nothing. Know too that the Vikings themselves wrote with the Younger Futhark, a shorter alphabet than the Elder Futhark that came before it — worth knowing if you want an inscription they could have read.

Both use interlace; the difference is in what the knotwork carries. Celtic stays with knots, spirals, triskeles, crosses and animals drawn out into ribbons, woven evenly over and under, sometimes lifted with the ochre, vermilion and deep blue of illuminated manuscripts. Nordic adds its own bestiary — beasts that bite, stretch and knot themselves, in the manner of the Urnes or Jelling styles — and Norse motifs: runes, which bring writing in, Thor's hammer, Yggdrasil, ravens, wolves, the valknut. A plain knot with nothing Norse in it reads as Celtic, even when it's sold as Viking. If the piece carries runes, Norse symbols or beasts drawn in the Viking-age styles, it's Nordic.