Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Keyhole tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small keyhole outline is tattooed on the inner wrist of a hand that holds an antique iron key. The linework is thin and black, with no shading, and the design is simple and centred on the wrist. The image is a close, slightly warm photograph against a dark fabric background, with the key and the purple nail polish as the main colour accents.

Fine line Forearm Keyhole Key

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 old man brought the key to my bench wrapped in a bread bag, which told me more about it than he meant to. Hand-forged iron, the bow worn smooth by thumbs that were not his. He wanted a blank cut to match, by Friday, and he would not say what the lock was for.

Keep reading

I filed the bit from the original pattern over two evenings with the wireless on low. The work itself was nothing. The hard part was the waiting, and the way the shop went quiet when the light failed over the abbey ruins across the road. On the second night he came back with a tin of shortbread and a sheet of paper traced from a door out past the castle wall, a keyhole drawn in pencil, narrow as a grain of rice, the same shape the iron had been wearing down for a century.

He told me then that the gatehouse at the castle had no gate. Its oak rotted off the hinges in the winter of his mother's funeral, and only the stone arch and its lock remained, set in a wall that stood alone in the nettles. His wife had kept the key after she moved to Carlisle, and he had never asked her for it, and she had never offered.

The next morning we walked out together with the cut blank in his coat pocket. He pressed it into the keyhole in the stone and turned it, and nothing clicked, nothing opened, only a faint scrape of metal on rock. He put his eye to the hole and stayed there a long while. When he straightened he held out the original key to me, not to take back the copy, but as if to show he had kept his end of something. I understood then that he had never wanted anything opened. He had only wanted to know the lock still fit.