Black and grey fine line tattoo of a bare tree shaped like a heart growing from a key, on the side of the ribs.

Heart-shaped tree and key on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single key forms the base of a bare tree whose branches arch upwards to form a heart shape in the negative space. The linework is fine and the branches are shaded with soft grey tones, with small dots at the branch tips. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the ribcage against plain pale skin, with the edge of the breast visible at the right.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Tree Key Heart Branches

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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 padlock on the winter barn had rusted shut by October, so Dad sent me up the ladder with a file and a tin of oil while the lads argued over whether the big top would come down before the frost. I was nine. The circus had shrunk to four wagons, one elephant nobody could afford to feed, and a ringmaster who signed his letters from the bank.

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Inside the barn the old cages leaned against each other like drunks at closing time. Mrs Vell, who had worked the high wire until her knees gave out, wore a key on a loop of red wool round her neck. It opened nothing any more. She said it belonged to the wagon she was born in, sold in 1961 to a man in Skegness who kept his coal in it. "Keys outlive the doors," she told me, and gave me a ginger biscuit for not being frightened of the dark.

The padlock gave on the third go. Behind it, scratched into the tailboard of an old ticket wagon, was a tree drawn with a nail: bare branches reaching up and meeting over a space that looked like a heart if you squinted. Mrs Vell said the company painter had done it the year before the war, and that every family who stayed on the road carried a copy of it somewhere, one branch for each season they had kept faith.

The circus folded in February. The elephant went to a sanctuary in Wales and the wagons went under tarpaulins in a field near Spalding. Mrs Vell's key hangs by my front door now. It fits nothing I own, and I would never throw it out, because the tree growing up from its stem is the only map I have of where we all used to stand.