Black and grey tattoo of a key and an ornate scrollwork heart on the ankle, with the key appearing to hang from a beaded chain.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Key and filigree heart on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a foot and ankle showing a tattoo of a skeleton-style key hanging from a beaded chain beside an ornate heart with filigree scrollwork. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, with darker detail in the key and the heart's swirls. The composition is close and angled, with the dark background emphasising the tattoo.

Ankle Key Heart Filigree Scrollwork Chain Bead Anklet

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you've forgotten Miss Hollis's cupboard. Forty years and nobody has ever owned up to taking the brass key off its nail, so I'll tell it myself and you can wince at the bits that concern you. It began with a string of jet beads and a key no longer than my little finger, the sort that opens a drawer nobody remembers buying.

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The heart came later, a silver locket with swirls cut so fine they caught the light like frost on a window. Its scrollwork had been rubbed smooth by somebody's thumb, and the girl who wore it that autumn was the only one allowed to stay behind after the bell. She'd tie the key on a loop of thread and carry it down the corridor like a lantern, and nobody asked where she was going because we all assumed she was in trouble.

She was not in trouble. Behind the stockroom door was a tin box, and in the tin were folded notes from pupils who had lost things they could not say aloud: a father's temper, a best friend, a bus fare home, the nerve to sing in assembly. She read every one, wrote a small answer on the back in pencil, and locked the paper inside the heart. The key opened the locket, not the cupboard. That was the trick of it.

Then the notes stopped. The tin was empty one Monday, and the key was back on its nail with the beaded string coiled beneath it, neat as a rosary. I have it here in my handbag, because I was the one who found the last note folded at the bottom of the tin, and it had my name on the front. Pass the locket along the row, would you, Gordon? Mind the clasp. It still opens.