Two forearm tattoos: a black and grey Jack Skellington skull on a key shape on the right arm, and a teal and pink padlock on the left arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jack Skellington and lock forearm tattoos

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close view of two forearms, each with a tattoo. The right arm shows a black and grey skull with a Jack Skellington style head, its wide eyes and stitched grin shaded in greys, with a spiky collar and a key-like shaft below. The left arm shows a padlock-style shape filled with teal, pink and yellow panels and a dark keyhole, outlined in a clean dark line on pale skin against a dark background.

Forearm Jack skellington Skull Key Padlock Keyhole

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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

Mrs Ottoline Vane had kept the key-cutting shop on Gallow Lane for forty years, and in all that time nobody had ever brought her a key that didn't fit something. The boy who came in on the wet Tuesday had one clenched in his fist, long as a finger, its bow a skull grinning under a crown of bent nails. He wanted it copied. "Copied to what?" she asked. He didn't know. It had arrived through the post, unsigned, with a note that said only: the cupboard is locked again.

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She turned it over under the lamp. The shaft had a crook near the bottom like a snapped bone, and the teeth were cut in a pattern she recognised from the old ledgers, a pattern made for doors that open not onto rooms but onto a season. Across the street the church clock had stopped at a quarter to something. "The lock is in our hall," the boy said. "Teal and pink, like a patchwork heart. My gran keeps the Christmas decorations in it, and since the pumpkins went out it won't open for anyone."

Ottoline took a blank from the drawer and filed it by hand, though she suspected the original needed no copying at all. When she handed back the key it turned the lock anyway, slow and grudging, and the cupboard breathed out a smell of cold pine and burnt sugar. Inside, the baubles sat stacked beside a jack-o'-lantern nobody remembered carving.

"Keep the copy," she said, "and give the old one back to whoever's been posting them. Tell him the door only opens once a year, and he has to knock first." The boy left with two keys and wet shoes. Ottoline wrote in her ledger: one lock, two seasons, no charge.