Small solid black keyhole tattoo on the side of a woman's neck, behind her ear, shown from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Keyhole tattoo on the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black keyhole sits on the side of the neck, just behind the ear, with the wearer photographed from behind. The shape has crisp edges and a flat black fill with no shading or fine detail. The image is in natural tones, with dark hair pinned up, a thin gold chain and a gold hoop earring, and a pale yellow striped top at the bottom edge.

Neck Keyhole

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

Nobody came for the key. It sat in the tray at Lost Property for nine months, between a dog lead and a set of bagpipe reeds, a short iron thing with a bow worn smooth by somebody's thumb. Ada Whitlow logged it every Monday and every Monday wrote 'no lock identified' in the same square of the ledger.

Keep reading

On the last Friday of March a man in a wet grey coat stood at the hatch and described a tin trunk he had left in the guard's van on the 6.14 to Carlisle. Ada asked him what was inside. He said letters, mostly, and a carriage clock that had stopped at a quarter past four. She asked whether the trunk had a keyhole. He looked at the iron key in her hand for a long time before he answered, and when he did his voice had gone thin.

The guard brought the trunk up from Preston two days later. Ada slid the key in, turned it, and the lock gave with no sound at all, as though it had only been waiting for the right shape. Folded on top of the letters was a sheet of pencilled paper: keep the key at the station, in case I don't come back for it.

That evening Ada returned the key to its tray, bow up, beside the bagpipe reeds, and wrote the date in the ledger. In the square marked lock she wrote a single word, and it was the first time she had ever been sure of one.