Black ink sketch on paper of a tattoo design showing a keyhole inside a heart, flanked by pistons and ornate scrollwork, with two black pens beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Keyhole heart and pistons tattoo design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a tattoo design on white paper shows a keyhole set within a heart shape, with two pistons running diagonally across the centre. Dense scrollwork and swirling ornamental lines fill the surrounding space and the lower section. The linework is black and fine, with some areas of hatching and solid shading, and the photograph is taken at a slight angle on a wooden surface.

Keyhole Heart Piston Engine Scrollwork Ornament

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 engine of the Constance had been seizing since the spring tides, and Ada Pell went down into the bilge with a paraffin lamp because her father's hands had got too unsteady for the spanner. Her father sat on the hatch and told her what his own father had told him, the way old men tell things when they think the telling is the only useful part left to them. The smith in Gullhaven had forged the two pistons for the boat's first engine. When he was paid, he asked for one thing only, that the iron heart welded to the housing keep its keyhole, and that no boat bearing it be sold out of the village.

Keep reading

Ada found the trouble where her father said it would be, a rust scale locking the left piston halfway up its bore. She worked at it with a brass drift and the flat of a knife until her knuckles bled into the grease. When she tapped the crank, the engine gave a cough, then another, then a steady knocking that rang through the hull like someone answering a door. The fleet had gone out that morning under a flat grey sky, and by noon the fog came down so thick the bow disappeared from the wheelhouse. Nine boats were still out there somewhere, and the radio had gone quiet.

She steered by the sound of the engine. Where the water shoaled, the pistons beat slower, and where the channel ran deep they quickened, so she let the rhythm lead her through the rocks. When the Constance nosed into the harbour mouth, the other boats were already tied up along the wall, their crews standing on the quay with their collars turned up.

That night Ada took the small iron key from her father's neck and fitted it into the heart. It turned without resistance, as though it had only been waiting. Nothing opened. But out on the water the fog peeled back from the harbour like a sheet pulled off a bed, and the first stars showed over the breakwater.