Traditional tattoo of a heart-shaped padlock with a teal key and three ribbon banners on a calf, with dotwork shading.

Heart padlock and teal key with name banners

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A heart-shaped padlock with a keyhole and teal scrollwork sits at the centre, with a teal key laid across the top and three ribbon banners with lettering wrapping around it. The linework is bold and black, with stippled dotwork shading in the grey areas and teal fill on the lock and key. The design is centred on a leg, shown from a close, slightly angled view on a white surface.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Heart Padlock Key Keyhole Banner Scroll Ribbon

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

The boarding house at Mersham Gap had one key that opened every door, and Mrs Ada Pell kept it on a loop of blue wool round her wrist. Nobody in the town thought this strange until the winter the sea came up over the harbour wall and a lodger named Patrick Lowe knocked at the back door with a box under his arm.

Keep reading

He said the box was his mother's and it had been locked since her funeral. He had no key. Ada looked at the brass hasp, then at the heart-shaped padlock with its little ring of teal stones, and she said the lock had come from a shop on the pier that had burned down forty years back. She had sold the matching key to a sailor's widow, and the sailor's widow had sold it to the tide.

Patrick sat at the kitchen table while the kettle ticked. A girl called Jackie, who scrubbed the stairs for a penny a flight, came in with wet hands and said the key was not lost, only waiting for someone who would ask it properly. Ada snorted. Then she unhooked the blue wool from her wrist, and the key on it was small and green with age, and she laid it across the box without a word.

It turned. Inside was a bundle of letters tied in ribbon, every one addressed to a name that was not Patrick's. Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. He looked up, and Ada was already filling the pot again, because a boarding house cannot stop for grief and the tea would not make itself.