Black ink drawing of a key whose bow forms a bare tree, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Key with a bare tree bow

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A key is drawn in solid black ink, with its bow shaped as a leafless tree whose branches spread out at the top. The linework is bold and sketchy, with grey wash marks scattered around the canopy and along the shaft. The key has a plain, simple form on a white background with no colour.

Botanical Key Tree Branches

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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 Okafor's spare set has sat in the drawer of the concierge desk since 1987, and nobody has ever asked what the key on the hook is for. You take it down on a Tuesday because the lift on the east stack has stopped again and the council man wants a name for his report. The brass is warm from the drawer. The bow is a tree, bare as February, its branches thin as the wire ties on a bread bag, and the shaft is worn to a dull shine where thumbs have rubbed it for forty years.

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You try it on the doors of Hollins House, floor by floor. Fourteen of them open for the bin men, the gas man and a boy hunting for his nan's flat. The key turns on nothing else. On the twenty-second floor you stop outside a door with peeling blue paint and a chalk hopscotch grid still faint on the landing. The key goes in as if it has been waiting. Behind the door is an empty bedroom with a radiator bolted to the wall and a window propped open onto the car park.

Someone has been living here after all, though not in the usual way. A sapling stands in a paint tin on the sill, two feet high, its leaves the colour of old pennies. A note is taped to the tin in careful capitals: WATER SUNDAYS. DON'T LET THEM CUT IT. You understand then that the key was never for a lock. It was for the tree, carried up and down these stairs by someone who kept it alive through three winters with the heating off. You fill the tin from the kitchen tap and watch the water darken the soil.

On the way down the lift works, for once, and you ride it with the key in your fist. In the lobby you hang it back on its hook and leave the drawer open a crack, the way you found it. The council report says the east stack is beyond repair. It does not mention the sapling, which by the following Sunday has put out one new leaf, bright as a coin.