Flash-style drawing of a large key wrapped in two banners reading Courage is the Key, with a heart-shaped lock, a compass and bubbles, in traditional-style colour outlines.

Key with Courage is the Key banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold illustrated key runs vertically through the centre, with two ribbon banners across it reading COURAGE and is the KEY. A blue heart-shaped keyhole, a compass, a crescent and a cluster of bubbles sit around the key on a black background. The thick black outlines and flat colour fills of yellow, orange, blue and cream give it a classic tattoo flash look.

Traditional Lettering Key Banner Lettering Heart Keyhole Compass Bubble Moon Courage

Find an artist for this

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

The key came off its nail on the third night of the blizzard, and Mrs Okonedo swore it had hung there since the Victorians. It was the old room key for number nine, the brass gone dark, its bow worn smooth by a century of thumbs. The snow had sealed the lane, the coach would not come, and the four of us stranded at the Stag and Lantern had nothing to do but watch the drifts climb the window.

Keep reading

Pemberton, the travelling clockmaker, said the lock on number nine had been replaced in the sixties and the key fitted nothing. Mrs Okonedo said that was exactly why it was worth keeping. I went up with a candle anyway, because the boy who swept the stairs said a door up there rattled at night, and because I had been lying awake listening to the wind and wanted something to do with my hands.

The door was not locked. Inside was a narrow room with a tin compass on the sill, its needle spinning loose, and a window furred with frost. Someone had scratched a crescent moon into the glass. Beneath the sill lay a bundle of letters tied in blue ribbon, all addressed to a woman in the village who had never come back to collect them.

I carried them down to the fire. Mrs Okonedo read the top one aloud, then stopped, folded it along its old creases, and said the key had only ever been for asking. Nobody spoke for a while. Then Pemberton took out his pocket knife and began, very carefully, to cut the ribbon.