Two matching tattoos: a rosary key with the word Eternity on an upper arm, and a heart padlock with a red bow, rosary beads and Eternity on a thigh.

Matching rosary key and heart padlock tattoos

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The upper tattoo shows an ornate key with a looped bow, rosary beads, a small cross and the word Eternity in script, drawn in black linework. The lower tattoo shows a heart-shaped padlock with a keyhole, a small red bow on top, dotted rosary beads and the word Eternity beneath, with light grey shading on the lock. The photo is taken at an angle with the two tattoos on separate limbs against a plain background.

Upper arm Thigh Key Rosary Cross Padlock Heart Bow Keyhole Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the pair of you, and mind the tent pole, it has leaned since the Coventry wind. You want the story of Ada Marr and the heart lock? Very well. Every act in our show had a gimmick, and hers was escaping. Ada went into a sack in the middle of the ring with her wrists cuffed, and four minutes later she stepped out with the cuffs in the sawdust and a ribbon in her hair. The banner over the entrance promised Eternity in curly gold letters, and the crowds believed it, because they kept coming back to watch her get out of things.

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By the summer of the long decline the ring had shrunk to three elephants, a dog act and a fire-eater who had lost his eyebrows. Takings were coppers a town. So Ada walked to the smith at Market Harbour, a deaf old man called Fenwick, and asked him for a lock that would hold a promise. He beat her a heart out of iron, pierced a keyhole through the middle, and hung it on a rosary her mother had carried over from Naples, the beads trailing down like seed from a split pod. She filed her own key and wore it on a cord beneath her blouse.

The turn came in October, when young Tom Peel, who drove the horses, said he was leaving for the mills. Ada didn't argue. She snapped the heart shut on the iron hoop of the wagon door, pressed the key into his palm and said, keep this till I ask for it back. He laughed and promised to bring it home. He never went to the mills, and she never asked.

Last I heard the show had been sold for scrap, but the wagon still stands in a field outside Spalding, its door shut on that little iron heart, and the key sits in a tin on Tom's shelf, bright as the day it was filed. Mind the step going out, it's rotten.