Black ornamental key tattoo with green vines, leaves and small red flowers across the forearm, in a botanical style.

Black key wrapped in green vines on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black key with a scrolled, filigree bow runs diagonally across the forearm, with its shaft and bit shaded in solid black and light grey highlights. Green vines with leaves and small red buds or flowers wind around the key and trail out to the left. The colour ink is bright and the black areas are solid, with the composition centred on the key and spreading outwards along the arm.

Botanical Forearm Key Vine Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate on Tallow Lane had been locked since the tanneries closed, and nobody in Harrowgate Row had seen the key that opened it. Mrs Ada Finch said it was in the ironmonger's drawer under the till, wrapped in brown paper, and that her husband had told her never to touch it. Her husband had been dead eleven winters. So at ten past midnight Tom Abel crept round the back of the shop with a torch he kept switching off, and found the drawer stuck fast.

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The key was heavier than it looked. Its bow was cut in scrolls like the ironwork on the bridge, and the bit was black and clean, as if someone had oiled it that morning. When he pulled it free, a green shoot came with it, thin as cotton, and it wound round his wrist before he could shake it off. Small red buds opened along it as he watched, the colour of cherries in a jar. He walked up the hill with the vine trailing behind him over the wet cobbles, past the lamps that had gone out one by one since autumn.

The lock turned without a sound. Beyond the gate there was no tannery yard, only a long garden climbing the hill, with leaves on every railing and a path lit by nothing at all. At the top a woman in a grey coat stood waiting with her hand out. She did not ask for the key. She asked whether he had brought the vine, and when he nodded she laughed and said it was the first honest thing anyone had brought her in years.

He was home before the bells. The vine stayed on his arm, and in the morning the whole lane was green, every gate in Harrowgate Row wound with it, and Mrs Finch stood at her door with the brown paper in her hand, smiling as if she had always known the key was never hers to keep.