Small solid black keyhole tattoo on the side of a woman's neck behind her ear, with her hair pulled up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Keyhole tattoo on the side of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black keyhole sits on the side of a woman's neck, just behind and below her ear. Her face is turned away from the camera, and her hair is pulled up while a thin gold chain and a gold hoop earring are visible. The soft, neutral lighting keeps the focus on the crisp black shape against pale skin.

Neck Keyhole Hair

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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

Sit closer, the fire's gone to ash and the wind has been at the walls all night. You want the door in the north tower, the one with no handle and no hinges anyone could see. Only the hole. Ambrose Veal, the smith from Skerrow, cut that lock for Lady Ysolde, who wanted a room in the castle that no one could open from the outside. She kept her letters there, and her sea charts, and a little brass bell she rang when she wished to be left alone. The key was on a black cord around her neck, and when she sailed for the mainland one grey March, the cord went down with her in the crossing.

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The villagers came after that. They dug the moat wider, they took their axes to the oak, and they sent for a locksmith from the coast who swore on his mother that he could pick anything with a wire. He could not. The door stood. Only the keyhole stayed, black and sooty, the size of a thumb. Years went by and the roof fell in around it, but the door never gave way. Then a girl named Nell Harrow started climbing up each evening with a hairpin in her teeth, and every evening she pressed one eye to that dark hole and stayed there until the bell in the village struck six.

We asked her what she saw. She would only say the sea, the whole grey width of it, lit from behind by a lamp nobody had lit since the lady drowned. Nell grew up and left, and the tower is still standing, though the wind has never stopped trying. So go on, lean close now. Put your eye to the dark and tell me what's on the other side.