Two forearms with matching tattoos: a red scrollwork heart padlock on the left and a heart-shaped key with a separate key on the right, in a neo-traditional style.

Matching padlock and key forearm tattoos

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side with matching tattoos. The left arm has a heart-shaped padlock with dense scrollwork and a keyhole, filled with red ink and grey shading. The right arm has a heart-shaped key with scrollwork above a separate key, rendered in grey and black shading with a soft drop shadow.

Neo-trad Forearm Padlock Key Heart Keyhole Scrollwork

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 brass heart had gone wrong twice already, once when the scrolls ran too deep for the file, and again when Mabel Ruddock brought back the plate she had asked him to make a pair of. She wanted the lock and the key cut from the same grey iron, she said, and she wanted the lock painted red, the way her late husband had painted the gate at the Wicker bridge. Dennis Hollis, who ran the forge beside the canal in Stockport, had never been asked for colour before.

Keep reading

He worked through the winter with the bellows wheezing and the barges grinding the ice at the lock gates. The padlock came first: a heart of iron with curls so fine they looked like frost on a window, and a keyhole cut so true that a sliver of lamplight showed through it. He filled the hollows with red enamel until they glowed like a coal someone had forgotten to bank. The key took longer. Each time he thought the bit was right, the bow came out lopsided, and Mabel came in on Thursdays to stand by the anvil and tell him he was rushing.

On the last Thursday in February she set a small tin box on the bench and asked him to open it. Inside lay a second key, worn thin, its bow a heart with the same swirls he had been struggling to copy. Her husband had made it for her the year they married, and she had lost the lock it belonged to during a house move. Dennis turned it over under the lamp. The scrollwork on it was not copied from anything. It had been drawn by someone who knew the metal well.

He filed his own key down to match the old one, a few strokes at a time, and the lock clicked open on the second try, a clean note that rang off the cold yard walls. Mabel held the red heart up to the light, then the grey key beside it, and for once she said nothing at all. She tucked the old key into her coat, where it would stay, she told him, until someone needed to open the gate for her.