Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an ornate crowned key, a ribbon, a potion bottle with a skull and a Drink Me banner, shown without a body placement.

Key and potion bottle with Drink Me banner

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an ornate key with a crown and heart-shaped bow, wrapped in a looping ribbon that leads down to a potion bottle. The bottle holds a cork or stopper with crystals, a rose tied at the neck, and a small skull in the liquid, with a banner reading DRINK ME. The fine, sketched linework and light shading sit on a plain white background, with the ribbon trailing to the lower right.

Key Crown Banner Ribbon Crystal Rose Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had found the windfalls by the time I got the ladder against the old damson wall, so I was already cross when a key dropped out of the ivy and bounced off my boot. It was heavier than it looked, the iron gone dark with age, a little crown perched on top and a bow shaped like a heart curled in on itself. A ribbon was knotted round the shank, faded to the colour of weak tea.

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Grandad always said the orchard had a habit of keeping things: spoons, marbles, a bishop's ring, once a whole pram. I pocketed the key and went on picking Bramleys until the light turned amber and the first moths lifted off the grass. Only then did I see the bottle, standing in the fork of the lowest Discovery branch as if someone had set it down to tie a shoelace. A paper banner was looped round its neck, DRINK ME in capitals written by a very steady hand, and a dried rose had been tucked beneath the knot.

I ought to have left it alone. Instead I found the keyhole in the brass cap of the stopper, fitted the key and turned it, and the cork came free with a sound like a cat settling. The liquid was the colour of a late pear. When I tipped the bottle to the light, a small white skull rolled up through it, grinned at me, and was gone.

I did not drink it. I stood it on the kitchen windowsill beside Nan's plum jam and went to bed. In the morning the bottle was empty, the key was gone from my pocket, and the orchard gate, which I had shut the night before, was standing wide open. Beyond it, on the path, lay a single red apple with a bite taken out of it, and a note in that steady hand: Mind the wasps, they have been waiting for you.