Traditional-style flash design of a gold key and lock with teal roses, green leaves and pale banners reading Darling You'll be okay.

Key and lock with roses and banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A flash design showing a gold key passing into a gold padlock, framed by two teal roses, green leaves and twisting brown stems. Three pale banners carry the words Darling You'll be okay, and the line HOLD ON TILL MAY sits beneath the artwork on a black background. The linework is bold and dark, with flat fills and simple shading on the leaves, roses and metal.

Traditional Key Lock Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The key stuck in the padlock the way it always did in February, so I wiggled it with two fingers while the band downstairs slid into a waltz nobody could dance to properly. Mrs Pellow had given me the cloakroom box to mind that winter, along with the brass key on its loop of green ribbon and strict instructions never to lend it to a girl with a sailor. I had lent it to nobody. I was only trying to get my own good gloves out.

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The chalk on the wall by the ladies' door said HOLD ON TILL MAY in Connie's loopy hand, and beneath it someone had drawn a wilting rose with a cross through it. We all wrote things there. Connie wrote that the Germans could keep the sugar. Mrs Pellow wrote nothing and only polished the coat box on Saturdays with a scrap of chamois, as if the hall might be requisitioned and she wanted it presentable. Stan's last letter had come in March, folded small, four lines and a row of kisses. Darling, you'll be okay, it said at the bottom, in pencil, pressed so hard it had torn the paper.

The bells started at ten past three on the eighth of May. The band stopped mid-bar, the doors flew open and the whole hall came down the stairs as if the floor had tilted. I stood at the cloakroom counter with the padlock hanging open in my hand. Mrs Pellow came out from behind the urn, took the key from my fingers, turned it once and dropped it into my apron pocket. "Keep that," she said. "You've earned the wear on it."