Two people show matching shaded padlock tattoos with pink heart-shaped panels, with script reading Like Mother and Like Daughter, on their upper backs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching heart padlock tattoos on two shoulders

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Two matching tattoos of ornate padlocks shaped like hearts, with pink filigree-patterned panels and keyholes, sit on the upper back of two people photographed from behind. Script lettering reading "Like Mother" and "Like Daughter" runs beside each design. The outlines and shading are grey and black, with the pink fills providing the main colour against the skin and clothing.

Shoulder Back Padlock Heart Keyhole Filigree Script lettering Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis came into the shop on Chapel Street with a brass key wrapped in a handkerchief and asked Tom Greaves to make her a lock that would open for only two people. He said he could make a lock do most things, but he had never been asked for one that opened for two.

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He spent three weeks on it. He cut the body from a heart-shaped blank, sawed the filigree panels so light came through them, and backed each opening with a sliver of rose-tinted glass he had sent up from Sheffield. He set two keyholes side by side and cut two keys to the same pattern. One key had a small notch worn in its shoulder from years in a coat pocket. The other was new and bright, and it still smelled of the file.

Her daughter came in on a wet Thursday to collect the new key, having moved to Leeds the spring before. She turned it in the hole without quite meaning to, and the bolt slid with a sound like a drawer closing in another room. Tom had not expected the lock to work so well, or for the girl to laugh the way she did, as if she had been holding her breath since the train.

That evening he hung the pair on a nail above the bench, the notched key on one hook and the bright one on the other, and left the hearts unlocked for anyone to pass a thumb across. Mrs Hollis came back on Saturday to check the bolts. She said nothing about the lock, only that the bright key had worn a little already, and that she had been carrying it in her palm all week to see whether it would.