Black ornate key tattoo over soft watercolour-style splashes of purple, pink, blue and orange on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black key over watercolour splashes on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black ornate key with a detailed bow sits across the wrist, overlapping loose, blotted patches of purple, pink, blue, orange and yellow. The key has solid black fill and fine detail, while the coloured areas look soft and diffuse with bleeding edges. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a cream sleeve at the left edge.

Forearm Key Splashes Watercolour

Find an artist for this

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

Mrs Ada Prideaux had kept the brass cabinet locked since her husband's funeral, and Frances, who swept the floor of Harrow and Daughter Keys every morning before the bus came through, had never once seen inside it. On the Thursday the bell over the door rang twice in a row, which meant a customer who did not want to wait, and a man in a damp raincoat set a black iron key on the counter.

Keep reading

"It came out of a bureau at Lowther Farm," he said. "The lock's gone. I want to know what it fits before the auction." Frances turned it over. The bow was cut into a rosette of curling leaves, and the bit had been filed by someone patient. She knew every cabinet key in the town by heart, and this was none of them. Her mother took it to the back bench and held it under the lamp for a long time, the way she held a coin she suspected of being bent.

That evening they went through the drawers of the old paint shop above the chandler's, where her father had mixed watercolour washes for the church windows before the war. In a tin marked only with a smear of cobalt they found a tiny lock, and the key slid in with a soft click. Inside lay a row of dried cakes of colour, violet, rose, cerulean and ochre, each one stamped with a single letter. Frances read them twice, then laughed until her mother did too.

The man came back on Saturday. Frances wrapped the key in tissue and handed it across, and she did not mention the paints, only that the lock was sound. He paid in coins, glanced at the sunlit window where a tin of blue had been left open to dry, and walked off towards the harbour with his collar up. Frances wiped a wet thumbprint from the glass and thought that the colours might be worth more than any key.