Two matching black and grey skeleton key tattoos, one on each ankle, shown against patterned fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching skeleton key ankle tattoos

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two bare ankles side by side, each with an identical skeleton key tattoo. The ornate bows have scrollwork detail, and the shafts and bits are shaded in black and grey. The keys are centred on the ankles and sit against a soft, slightly blurred background of red and teal patterned fabric above a carpeted floor.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass blank was the last of the good stock, and Ada Pettigrew wanted two keys cut from it before the Thursday boat. Hal Mercer clamped the blank in the vice and filed the bow by lamplight, the rasp ringing against the rain that came sideways off the harbour and drummed on the shutters of his shop on Quay Street.

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She had brought two sea chests, black with tar and bound in iron. One belonged to her son Tom, bound for the cod banks off Newfoundland. The other belonged to her sister-in-law, Nell, who was following her husband to Halifax with a baby on her hip and no notion of what the winter would be. "Identical," Ada said, tapping the bench. "Then whichever of them opens the other's chest will have to come home and admit it."

Hal cut the wards with a fine chisel, then the bit with its double notch, and when he held the pair side by side under the lamp he could not tell which was which. He wrapped them in waxed linen and wrote both names on a card. Ada paid him in shillings and a jar of plum jam, then stood a while at the door, watching the grey water as if it owed her an answer.

The letter came in the spring. Nell had written in a looping hand that her chest had opened on the second night out, the key turning as sweetly as if it had been made for her, and that she had laughed until she cried. Tom, she added, had not yet tried his, as he was keeping the lock for something he had not yet named. Hal read it twice, then took down the blank and started on a third, though he had no one to give it to.

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