Traditional style tattoo of an ornate grey heart with a keyhole and red accents on the chest, with a colourful tattoo on the forearm below.

Ornate heart and keyhole tattoo on the chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A person wearing a red and white check shirt, a white vest top, a black lace bra and layered chain necklaces shows a large ornate heart with a keyhole at the centre, set in scrollwork on the upper chest. The heart is shaded in greys and black with small red details, and red and pink flowers appear beside it. A colourful tattoo with red flowers and lettering is visible on the forearm at the lower right.

Traditional Chest Forearm Heart Keyhole Scrollwork Flower Lettering Necklace Cross Dagger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The key went over the side somewhere south of Finisterre, and not one of the thirty men aboard the Mary Ellen would own to dropping it. Old Tobias Crane had cast the lock himself in Bristol, a brass heart with scrolls spilling off it like bindweed, and the keyhole sat at its centre where a thumb would press. Inside it he kept his wages, his letters and a pressed sprig of heather from a girl in Cork he never married.

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The cook reckoned a gull had stolen it. Ansel, the ship's boy, said the sea wanted paying in kind, so Tobias should drop the chest over after it. Tobias listened to every theory and said only that a lock is no use without its key, which was true and no help at all. For a week he carried the heart about under his arm, tapping its brass with a thumbnail, while the coast of Ireland slid past to starboard.

On the eighth night a squall laid the ship over and the chest tore loose from its lashings. Tobias went after it across the streaming deck and got both arms round it, and as the bow lifted the brass heart split clean open along its scrolls. There was no key inside. There was only the heather, pressed flat and brown, and a folded note in a hand he knew was his own, which read: the lock was only ever for keeping the wind out.

They made Cork two days later. Tobias never mended the heart. He hung it on a nail above his bunk with its seams gaping, and when the wind came through the cabin it sang in the gaps between the flowers.