Two pencil drawings of tattoo designs in script lettering: a shaded key reading one heart, and a red and grey heart reading one love.

One heart key and one love heart designs

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

The image is a photograph of two panels of pencil drawing on paper. The top panel shows the words one heart in flowing script with a shaded key beneath, its bow rendered in gold-toned pencil. The bottom panel shows one love in script with a red and grey heart at the end of a swirling flourish, drawn with a coloured pencil in the foreground.

Lettering Key Heart Script Lettering Swirl

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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

Mags found the key in the lamp-room drawer on a Tuesday, the week the cage was going down for the last time, and she had it on a bootlace round her neck before the shift bell rang. The bow was worn smooth by a thumb that wasn't hers. Nobody on the surface would say whose key it was, only that old Dennis had kept a tin in the cupboard under the stairs for thirty years and never once let anyone open it.

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'Try it, then,' said Tom, leaning on the doorframe with his cap pushed back. He was thirteen and believed in nothing he could not sharpen. She knelt on the cold flags and slid the bit in. It went home with a small, reluctant click, the way a boot settles onto a worn step.

Inside were letters, a few dozen, each folded into quarters and dated in the same looping hand. Every one ended with the same two words, and beneath them a small drawn heart, shaded in pencil, the left half darker than the right where the pressure had been heavier. The last envelope was addressed to a woman in Ashfield Row and had never been posted. Mags read the first line and stopped, because it was neither an apology nor a declaration. It was a list of the things he had meant to mend in the house before the next shift, written in the order he would have done them.

She put the letter inside her coat, locked the tin and walked the half mile to Ashfield Row before the bell. The stamp cost the penny she had been saving for sweets, and Tom never forgave her for it.