Black ink line drawing of an ornate vintage key with stippled dotwork shading beside the words 'We carry our prisons with us' in handwritten capitals, with no body placement shown.

Key with a 'We carry our prisons with us' quote

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A vintage key with an ornate oval bow and a long shaft is drawn in black ink, with the bow and shaft shaded using fine stippled dots. The words 'WE CARRY OUR PRISONS WITH US' sit to the right in simple hand-lettered capitals, staggered over several lines. The image is in black and white on a plain white background, with the key on the left and the text on the right.

Dotwork Key Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Corrigan brought the key in wrapped in a page from last week's paper, as if it might still be warm from his pocket. Nobody in Porthglas had asked me to cut a key for the old gaol since it shut, so I put my glasses on and turned it over under the bench lamp. The bow was an oval of worn iron, the shaft long enough to reach the bottom of a coat, and the bit had been filed by someone who knew exactly how much a lock could forgive.

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"It opens nothing now," he said. "I want one that does."

I told him there was no blank for that pattern, which was true, and then I made him one anyway, because the gulls were loud on the harbour wall and the tide was out and I had nowhere else to be. Filing a copy is slow work. The old man talked through all of it about his brother, who had done eleven years for a fire that was not his fault, and who came out to find the boats sold to a company in Plymouth and their mother's cottage with a stranger's washing on the line.

When the key was ready he turned it in the door of my shop, and the bolt in the back room slid home with a sound like a full stop. He didn't smile. He weighed the copy in his palm, then pressed it back into my hand. "You keep it," he said. "It was never the key that was the trouble."

I walked home along the quay with it in my jacket, the same weight as the iron ring I had carried on my belt for thirty years. At the lifeboat slip I stopped and fitted my thumb into the oval bow, and I held on until the lamps came on across the water, and for once I could not tell which of us was the one being kept.