Close-up of a small blue-grey ornate key tattoo with a scrolled bow on the inner wrist, with the palm facing up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate key on the inner wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small ornate key with a scrolled, openwork bow and a simple shaft and bit sits vertically on the inner wrist. The outlines are dark and the interior is filled with soft blue-grey shading, giving a slightly faded look. The key is centred on the wrist against plain skin and a pale background, with the hand held palm up at the top of the frame.

Forearm Key Scroll Wrist

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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

By the last week of August the Hollins were stacking windfalls under the hedge because the press-house door had jammed, and old Mary Hollin swore it was the lock's doing and not the damp's. The key had gone missing with her father, who was said to have taken it to the grave in his waistcoat pocket.

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Her brother Tam would not break the door. He walked the lane to the blacksmith at Wick, a man with blue-grey hands from years of quenching, and asked him to make a new key from memory. The smith said memory was poor metal. Tam said he remembered the bow, a scrolled iron clover with its holes open like lace, and a shaft as plain as a fence post, with the bit cut in three notches like the seeds of an apple.

It took nine days. Each evening the smith held Tam's drawing against the lamp and shook his head, until on the ninth he filed the bow to match the pattern Tam had traced in soot on a slate. When they carried it back up the orchard the wind had turned, and the first Bramleys were thudding onto the grass.

The key turned first time. Inside, the press stood where it always had, and beneath its bench lay the old key on a length of twine, which Mary had never once thought to look for. She hung both on the nail by the door. The new one, she said, was for the next Hollin who forgot how the lock worked, and the old one was for remembering it.