Two wrists showing matching black and grey tattoos of a key and a heart-shaped lock, each with a trail of dots, on the forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching key and heart lock on wrists

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two wrists are shown side by side, each carrying a tattoo of half of a pair: a key on one and a heart-shaped keyhole lock on the other, joined by a trail of dots. The key and lock have shaded, detailed linework with grey tones, and the dots are solid black. The image is in black and grey, and the tattoos sit close together in the frame against a blurred dark red and white background.

Dotwork Traditional Forearm Key Heart Lock Dot Wrist

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 bell at St Oswin's had struck two when Mabel Crane found the lock still warm from the smith's hands. She had been told the heart was for the Harbour Gate, the one iron door in the old wall that nobody had opened since the flood, and she had been told the key was for the far side of the river. Neither was true, or neither was the whole truth, which is how most things in Saltmarsh were told.

Keep reading

She walked the dotted path the old way, from one studded stone to the next, counting the iron rivets set into the cobbles because her grandmother said a path counted was a path remembered. Fog came up off the water and the gas lamps wore haloes of yellow. At the seventh rivet she stopped, because the cobbles there rocked under her boot, and beneath them she found a tin box wrapped in oilcloth.

Inside lay a second key, tarnished green, with a bow cut in the shape of a heart and a bit patterned in a way no locksmith in the city would admit to making. Beneath it was a folded note in her grandfather's cramped hand: The first key opens what you were promised. The second opens what you chose to keep.

She turned the two keys over under the lamp for a long while. Then she walked back to the Harbour Gate, fitted the heart-shaped lock, and turned the bigger key until the bolts drew back with a sound like a held breath. Behind the door there was nothing but black water and a rowing boat tied to a ring, its oars laid neatly along the thwarts, waiting for someone who had already decided where to go.