Colour traditional tattoo on a forearm of an ornate golden key with a red gem heart, a bow and crown, a dagger, and a pink ribbon reading Fight like a girl.

Jewelled key and ribbon banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A golden key with a crown top, a red and pink gemstone heart and a yellow bow sits above a dagger wrapped in a pink ribbon banner. Scattered red and pink hearts and small dots surround the key, with green leaves behind the blade. Bold black outlines, shading and bright colour fill make up the design, which is centred on the inside of the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Key Crown Gemstone Bow Heart Dagger Ribbon Banner Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bailiff had already nailed the shutters of Mother Hesketh's shop when Dora came up the hill with the key in her fist. It was a heavy old thing, gold gone soft at the edges, with a crown on its head and a heart cut into its bow, and it had come to her in a biscuit tin with a letter that said only: this opens what they cannot.

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The bailiff was called Mr Crane and he wore a waistcoat the colour of wet slate. "The box is forfeit," he said. "Your grandmother's debts are the town's now." Dora did not argue. She had heard her grandmother argue for forty years and it had never once moved a debt. She walked round to the back, where the dust blew in red ribbons across the yard, knelt at the iron strongbox that had sat in the lean-to since before the railway came, and fitted the key.

It turned. Inside lay no coin, only a stack of letters tied with pink thread, each one a promise from a woman who had lent money to the poor and never asked for it back. Dora read them aloud to the crowd gathering at the gate, one after another, until Mr Crane's face went the colour of his waistcoat and the crowd began to laugh, then to cheer, then to shout his name.

He ran for the road in the heat, and the wind took his hat and carried it off towards the salt flats. Dora folded the last letter into her pocket and hung the key on a string around her neck, where it knocked against her breastbone all the way home. Nobody in that town ever again said a girl could not fight. They only said, when a thing needed doing properly, go and fetch the key.