Two small black fine line key tattoos on the inner wrists, one on each arm, worn with bracelets and rose charms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching key tattoos on two wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small black key tattoos sit on the inner wrists of two arms, with the left arm's key lower down near the bracelets. The linework is simple and thin, with solid black fill in the key bows and bits. The background is warm and dim, with cream nail polish, gold bangles, a wristwatch and cream rose charms visible.

Fine line Forearm Key Rose Bracelet Watch 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

Mind the third stair, it gives under you like a bad tooth. You want the Marigold story, do you? Sit where I can see you while I fold these sheets, because nobody in this town tells it right. Two girls came off the Hastings train in the wet summer of 1952 with one suitcase between them and a single brass key on a loop of string. The key opened the back gate of this house. Mr Haddow had cut it himself for the lodgers, and the girls had nowhere else to be, so Mrs Pell gave them the attic and told them the gate was never to be left unlocked after dark, not for any reason.

Keep reading

They were called Vi and Nan, and they were inseparable until the November the pier band came through. Vi went off with the drummer and a promise of London. Nan stayed behind to mind the gate. Before Vi left, she pressed a steel pen into Nan's hand, and they sat on the landing with the lamp turned low and drew a key on each other's inner wrist, bow and shaft and teeth, so that each would always carry the other's way home. Mrs Pell found the spilt ink on the banister the next morning and said nothing, which for her was a kind of blessing.

Nan kept that gate locked for thirty years. Every night she turned the key, said Vi's name to the dark, and went up to bed. Then one February the council sent a man to mend the lane lamp, and the gate was found standing open in the frost with a yellow rose from the garden pinned to the latch. Nobody knew who had left it. Nan never married and never said. When she died, her sister found two keys in the tin on her dresser, both polished bright, and only one of them fitted anything in this house.