Black and grey stippled line drawing of an ornate old key beside the hand-lettered words 'We carry our prisons with us'.

Ornate key and 'We carry our prisons with us'

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of an ornate vintage key with a two-lobed bow, a banded collar on the shaft and a notched bit. The phrase 'We carry our prisons with us' is set in hand-drawn capitals to the right of the key. The drawing is shown on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Fine line Key Lettering Quote Stipple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gaoler's daughter had kept the key on a cord around her neck since the winter the hall at Hollin Fell burned, and nobody in the village asked her to give it up. Its bow was two soft lobes worn smooth by thumbs, its bit notched like a saw. It opened nothing now. The chains had gone to the smith and the iron door had been carried down to the beck to make a bridge rail.

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When the tinker came up the pass in October, asking for old metal, she showed him the key and he laughed and said it was the only thing in the valley worth keeping. He offered her a shilling. She refused, and he went on down toward Kirkby with his cart rattling, and she climbed the scree above the ruin to watch the light go off the tarn.

That night she dreamed of the cell her father had kept, the damp walls and the single slit window, and woke with the cord tight against her throat. She understood then that the key had never been for the door. It was for the one who wore it, to remember the weight of a locked thing and the hand that had turned it. She tucked the key under her shift, pressed it flat against her breastbone, and went down to light the stove.