Traditional-style colour tattoo of an ornate black filigree heart lock with red ribbons and two crossed keys, placed on the arm.

Ornate heart lock and crossed keys with red ribbons

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black filigree heart-shaped lock with a pale keyhole at its centre, framed by red ribbons that loop above and to each side. Two black skeleton keys cross beneath the lock, with heart-shaped bows on their bows. Bold black outlines, grey shading and a soft red wash behind the lock give it a solid, graphic finish, with the design centred on the skin.

Traditional Other Heart Lock Keyhole Key Ribbon

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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

Mind the gunwale, and don't touch that brass lamp, it's been polished since the Coronation and I'll not have it dulled by a nosy lad. Right, you want the lock at Farthing Cut, do you? Everyone wants the lock. Nobody wants the keys, and the keys are the bit that matters.

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There were two of them, see, cut by a smith called Orrin Tate who'd lost his sweetheart to the fever the year he built that gate. He made the lock in the shape of a heart, all black iron scrollwork with a little keyhole at its middle like a held breath, and he made two skeleton keys to go with it, crossed like a pair of sailors' knives. Each bow he stamped with a heart so you could tell them apart in the dark. One went to Dora Lusk, the lock-keeper's girl, and the other to Pim Haddow, who ran the coal boat past the weir. Every spring they tied a red ribbon round the wheel, and the boatmen swore the cut ran smoother for it.

Then came the flood of the year the church bell cracked. Pim went out to lift the sluice in the black water and his boat went over at Wren's Bend. They found the coal, and they found his cap, but not his key, which he'd kept on a string round his neck. Dora kept hers. She swore no other key would ever turn that lock, and when the Water Board sent a man to cut a third, she sent him back down the towpath with his blanks in a bucket. For forty years the gate stood shut to every boat that wasn't hers.

So when the old lock finally rusted solid last winter, it was Dora's great-niece who found the key still hanging on its nail, the ribbon gone to grey lace. She carried it down to the gate, fitted it into that little heart, and turned. The iron gave with a sound like a door in an empty church, the water went loping off towards the sea, and the red ribbon on the wheel lifted in the draught as if it were waving at someone on the far bank.