Two small black key tattoos on the inner wrists, an ornate skeleton key on the left and a simpler key with an oval bow on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching key tattoos on two wrists

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two small key tattoos sit side by side on the inner wrists of two people, with the wrists photographed close together. The left key is an ornate skeleton key with a decorative bow and a detailed bit, while the right key is a plainer design with an oval bow. Both are solid black ink on pale skin, with a warm pink and purple tint across the photo and a pearl bracelet visible at the top.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chest had been locked since Valparaiso, and by the time the Marigold rounded the Horn you had given up on the purser ever finding its key. Mr Okonedo kept a spare on a chain under his waistcoat and would not say where he had got it. So when the carpenter's boy knocked at two bells with a cold brass blank and a stub of chalk, you knew what was wanted before he opened his mouth.

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You filed by lamplight for three nights. The wards were the hard part, the notches Okonedo had described in a mutter over his rum, and you cut them twice because the first set rang wrong under your thumb. The bow of the first key you scrolled and pierced until your eyes burned. Your father, who made locks in Plymouth before the sea took him, used to say a key should be ashamed of nothing but its teeth. The second blank came from the same offcut. You gave it an oval bow because you had run out of patience for scrollwork, and because it was for you, and nobody aboard would ever look at it twice.

On the morning we raised the Azores, Okonedo turned the key and the lid came up on hinges that had not moved in a year. Inside lay a folded chart, a child's shoe, and nothing else. He swore in three languages and tossed the chart over the rail. You kept the chart's corner in your pocket with the plain key, though you could not have said why.

At Falmouth the chest went ashore with a stranger's receipt and the ornate key went with it. The plain one stayed on your cord. It opens nothing now, and you find you rather like that about it.

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