Pen and pencil drawing of an ornate key with filigree scrollwork and leaves, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Ornate key tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed design drawing of an ornate key with a scrolled, filigree bow, a textured shaft and a notched bit. Fine black ink outlines sit over light grey pencil shading, and pencilled leaves and swirls trail up, around and below the key. The composition is a tall, centred vertical on plain paper.

Key Scrollwork Filigree Leaves Swirl Flourish

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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

The key is still warm from Dev's pocket when you lift it off the hook by the proving room, because he has carried it since midnight so the cold of the yard would not get into the brass. You turn it over in your palm the way you always do. The bow is a knot of iron leaves, curled tight and then loosened, and the shaft has the rough texture of a branch that someone decided to make into a lock. The bit has three notches cut like the teeth of a small saw.

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Out in the yard the gate sticks at its bottom hinge, as it always does, and you have to lift and turn in one movement. The notches catch the tumblers and the gate gives. Pewter light is creeping over the bins and the car park beyond them, and the flour sacks are stacked against the wall like sleeping dogs. Dev says the key came from a house in another town, where his grandmother wore it on a string around her neck, and that the smith who made the bit had never once seen a bakery. He only knew doors.

You go back in and hang the key on its nail. The ovens have been ticking for an hour, and the first tins are already rising in the cool of the proving room, soft and pale under their cloths. Somebody has to pull the shutter up before the first customer comes. You do it yourself this morning, while the street is still grey, and the iron scrolls of the key throw a small shadow across the flour bins as you pass them.