Realistic-style tattoo of a key with a pink bow and a keyhole, with the script words follow your heart along the shaft, on the side of a torso.

Key with pink bow and follow your heart script

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A key with a round bow head pierced by a keyhole, tied with a pink ribbon, runs diagonally across the skin. The key is shaded in grey and black with a soft highlight on the metal, and the script words follow your heart curve along the shaft in black. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against a plain, softly lit background.

Realism Lettering Ribs Key Keyhole Bow Ribbon Script Lettering

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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

The cash box on the Waltzer has rusted shut for the third night running, and Mr Cordell is already rattling the cage with a fistful of coins he wants to spend. You wipe your hands on your apron, walk the length of the midway past the candyfloss vat and the hook-a-duck pond, and knock on the blue caravan where Walter keeps the spare keys in a Quality Street tin.

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Walter is asleep in his deckchair, a Woodbine burnt down to the filter between two fingers. The tin is full of keys nobody has claimed in forty years, each with a luggage tag and a name in faded biro. You tip them onto the step. Most are the wrong shape, but one has a round brass head, and through a hole in its bow someone has knotted a pink satin ribbon, faded to the colour of boiled sweets. The tag says Gertie, Lowestoft, the summer the big wheel last turned.

You carry it back to the Waltzer. The cash box opens with a click like the end of a long argument, and the coins spill out in a silver rush. Mr Cordell asks where you found the key. You tell him the tin. He says Gertie never came back for her wages either, that she ran off with a diver from the pier show and left her apron folded on the counter. You feel the weight of the thing in your palm, warm from your pocket.

That night the generator hums too loudly for sleep, so you walk back to the caravan and find the tag turned over. On the reverse, in pencil, someone has written the advice you have been too sensible to take: follow your heart. You push the key deep into your coat, click the caravan door shut behind you, and set off after the lights of the last train.