Black and grey flash design of an open hand with a dotted triangle in the palm, a key, a bullet and the words TO KILL, with no body placement shown.

Open hand with triangle and key design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A linework drawing of an open hand with a stippled triangle in the palm, a key above the middle finger and a bullet floating beside the thumb. Radiating rays sit behind the hand, and the words TO KILL are lettered across the wrist above a dripping ornamental motif. The design uses fine hatching, solid black fills and dotwork shading on a plain white background.

Blackwork Dotwork Hand Triangle Key Lettering Ray Ornament Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Item forty-one, pawned Tuesday by a man who would not give his name: one brass key, filed to a notch, fitting no lock in this town. Item forty-two: a spent bullet, its nose flattened like a thumb pressed into wax. He asked four pounds for the pair and I gave him three, because someone had polished the bullet until it caught the lamp, and I respect a person who takes care over a thing they mean to be rid of.

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Mrs Okonedo from the chandlery came in on the Thursday with a sheet of cartridge paper folded in four. Inside was a hand drawn in ink so fine it looked engraved, with a black triangle set in the palm like a small window onto a night without stars. Beneath the wrist someone had lettered two words, and a row of dripping ornaments hung from them. Her husband had drawn it the winter before he went to sea. She wanted to know whether I had seen the key before. I had not, but I told her the pawn ticket was in the drawer and the ledger did not release goods on a story.

She did not buy anything. She sat on the stool by the scales and said the key opened a sea chest at the back of the shop that had not been opened since his last crossing, and that the bullet had been his father's, carried as a charm against the water. I said the ledger had its rules. She said the ledger had never met her husband, and I found I had no answer to that.

On Friday I went through the back room with the key in my coat pocket. The chest was empty except for a folded sheet of the same paper and a single bullet-shaped dent in the dust. I wrote Redeemed beside items forty-one and forty-two, underlined it twice, and left the drawing in the drawer where the rain could not reach it.