Black ink dotwork drawing of a lace-patterned bow with a heart keyhole and a dangling key, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Dotwork bow with heart keyhole and key

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design of a bow with lace-like patterns, a heart-shaped keyhole at its centre and a dangling ornate key with beaded strands. The shading is built from stippling, hatching and small looped marks in black pen on white paper. The design is centred and shown on its own, with a black marker lying across the top edge of the frame.

Dotwork Bow Heart Keyhole Key Bead Lace

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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

The key turned up in the bin chute on a Tuesday, tied to a scrap of lace gone the colour of weak tea. Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Carrick House could say whose it was, so Dora Pike, the caretaker's girl, carried it up and down the stairs for a week trying it in every lock she came across. It fitted the meter cupboard on nine. It fitted nothing else until she reached the roof.

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The roof hatch had been painted so many times that its heart-shaped keyhole had filled up with grey and become a dimple. Dora dug the paint out with a hairpin, scraping until the metal showed black, then pushed the key in and felt it catch. The hatch gave with a groan. Wind came up through the gap smelling of diesel and wet pigeons, and she climbed out into a sky the size of a county.

Strung along the parapet was a washing line, and from it hung dozens of lace bows, each one knotted by hand and each one tied around a small iron key. Some were rusted and some were bright. A few had names pencilled on paper tags. Dora understood then how it worked. You didn't keep the key you had lost. You left it up here for whoever came after and took away a bow in exchange, and the lock was never really the point.

She unpicked the lace from the old key, tied it round her own, and hung it on the line beside the others. Then she went back down through the hatch, locked it behind her with the key she had found, and counted the landings aloud all the way to the bottom.