Black key tattoo on the inside of a wrist, overlaid on soft watercolour-style blocks of purple, pink, blue and orange.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black key over watercolour blocks on a wrist

Other · Mixed · Photo

A black ornate key runs horizontally across the wrist, with its bow and teeth clearly outlined and shaded in grey. Behind it, faint letter-like shapes are filled with soft washes of purple, pink, blue and orange that blur into the skin. The colour is vivid and the composition is centred on the key, with the wash shapes extending beyond the outline.

Other Key Letter Watercolour Wrist

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, love, it gives under you, same as it gave under Mrs Tully's husband the winter he went to sea and never came back up them. Sit where the draught can't reach you and I'll tell you about the key.

Keep reading

The key belonged to number nine, at the top of Lantern Row, a room whose door had no keyhole at all. Only four letters were painted on the panel, violet, rose, blue and marmalade, and the sea damp had run them down into the wood so they bled into one another. Nobody could read them. Ada Fenwick, who kept the house after her mother, swore they spelt the name of a sailor who had paid for the room a year ahead and never once slept in it.

A locksmith from the harbour, Teodor Vance, came up with a canvas bag of blanks and tried every one of them. The key he finally cut was black iron, its bow shaped like a clover and its teeth so fine they looked like a comb. He fitted it to nothing. When Ada asked him why, he said the door was never meant to open from the outside. The letters were the lock, he said, and whoever could say them in the order the sea had left them could turn the key.

Ada tried for a month, muttering colours over the washing up. Then one wet evening, with the wind pushing at the window, she said violet, rose, blue, orange, and the panel gave a click like a tongue against teeth. Inside, the room was bare except for a chair pulled up to the glass, as if someone had only just stood from it. She locked the door again and kept the key in her apron pocket, and to this day she goes up the third stair every night just to say the colours aloud, in case.