Black and red keyhole tattoo with an eye inside, surrounded by circular lettering reading live the car-crash hearts, on the lower leg.

Keyhole and eye with circular lettering on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A keyhole containing a single eye sits at the centre of the design, outlined in bold black linework with the eye shaded in grey and black. The keyhole's lower section is filled with red-brown, with a few small purple specks nearby. Ring-shaped lettering in a handwritten style surrounds the motif and reads live the car-crash hearts, with the year 2016 visible in the ring, on a smooth area of skin.

Lettering Calf Keyhole Eye Quote

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

Sit down, sit down, the dough won't rise any faster for you pacing. Mrs Abernethy's bakery on Quarry Lane had one rule before the sun came up: nobody touched the iron door of the big oven until the bread told them so. Her grandson Tobias was seventeen and certain he knew better, and the morning he pressed his eye to the little round peephole in that door, he saw something he could never unsee.

Keep reading

Inside, the loaves were turning gold, and in that glow a single eye looked back at him from the far wall, wet and patient, the way a cat watches a mouse hole. He said nothing. He had heard the old talk at the Sow and Harrow: that a woman called Greer had come to the town with a suitcase full of hearts she'd broken on the road, and that she had once painted a keyhole on the door of her caravan and lived behind it ever after.

Tobias told no one, but he began to bake at night like a man doing penance. Every morning he left a warm cob on the step of that caravan at the end of the lane, and every morning it was gone by the time he returned, the paper wrapper folded into a neat square. On the twelfth day there was a key on the step instead, brass and worn, with a scrap of paper tied round it. Live the car-crash hearts, it said, in a hand that leaned forward as if it were running.

He turned the key in the oven door that night, and it fitted. The door swung open onto nothing but cold brick and the smell of rye, and somewhere past it, very faintly, a woman laughed and said, 'Shut that, you'll let the heat out.' Tobias shut it. He wears the key on a string now, and every dawn, before the bread is ready, he still listens for the click of a lock.