Black and grey geometric tattoo of an ankh with a star motif on the upper forearm of a person wearing a burgundy top and grey skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ankh and geometric star on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a burgundy blouse and grey skirt shows a tattoo on the outer upper forearm, near the elbow. The design is an ankh with a geometric star behind it, drawn in fine black linework with grey shading. The image is a close, softly lit crop with a plain pale wall behind, and the person's face is not shown.

Geometric Forearm Ankh Star Geometric motif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate of Ossary has had no keyhole for two hundred years, only a lattice of seven brass stars set into the iron, and you are the one who has been ordered to make the key that fits it. Your master, Hesketh, lies abed with a cough, so the workshop is yours: the furnace, the files, and the copper that turns green if you breathe on it wrong. The city watch has begun to gather at the foot of the wall each evening, watching you work through the open shutters as if a key might be a kind of prophecy.

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You measure the stars yourself. For nine nights you climb the tower stairs with a brass sextant and a candle stub, and you write each constellation on the back of an old tax roll. The bow of the key must be a looped ankh, because the old charter says the gate was built to let life pass in and out. The shank is a plain bar of copper. The bit is where the trouble lies, a star of eight points that must match the sky above the eastern wall at the exact hour of midnight, or the tumblers will never lift.

On the tenth night the bit is finished and the sky is clear. You carry the key down through the sleeping streets, your wrist aching under its weight, and you push it into the lattice. It turns with a sound like a bird lifting from water. The gate swings out onto the desert, and beyond it there is nothing but dunes and the same stars you have been drawing all week, close enough to touch. You stand in the gap a long while, deciding whether to step through.

You don't. You pull the key free, hang it on a cord at your own wrist, and let the gate close on its brass hinges. The watch sees you do it and says nothing. Hesketh, when you tell him in the morning, only laughs into his blanket and asks whether the key is warm. It is, and you tell him so, and you hold the ankh up against the window until the sun comes through it.