Black outline tattoo of a key with a round bow containing a geometric emblem, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Key with emblem on inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single key is drawn in thin black outline on the inner forearm, with a long shaft and notched teeth at the top. The round bow holds a geometric emblem made of angled lines and triangular sections. The tattoo uses only outline with no shading or fill, and the photograph is taken on a bed with a floral pattern in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ticket office at Carlisle has a locksmith's bench bolted to its back wall, and that is where Dilys Haworth cut my spare key in the November the left luggage closed for good. She didn't ask what it opened. She held the blank up to the strip light, frowned at the bitting, and said the bow was the only part of a key anyone ever looked at, so it had better mean something.

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I already had the locker key, brass with a worn tooth, stamped 117. The trouble was the other key, the one for the garage behind my father's house, which had gone missing somewhere between the Lakes and the coast. I wanted a copy cut from memory. Dilys shook her head and said memory made a poor pattern. She asked me to draw the bow instead, so I sketched a circle and filled it with the badge my father used to polish on Sunday mornings: angled bars, a few triangles, nothing that quite closes.

She laughed when she saw it. "Your dad have a thing for cars, does he?" I said he had a thing for doing things properly. She filed the teeth true to the old cuts and handed the new key across, still warm from her hand.

On the platform that evening I stood by the locker room door with both keys in my palm while a northbound train drew in, its doors sighing open. I turned the stamped one over, then the other, and saw that neither needed me to remember anything. I stepped aboard and left the door unlatched behind me.

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