Black and grey tattoo of an ornate key with a textured bow and a hand gripping it, running from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Ornate key tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tall ornate key with a large ring bow at the top, which appears to be gripped by a hand or claw near the shoulder. The shaft and teeth are shaded with dark, mottled textures and fine hatching, giving the metal a worn, aged look. The image is a close crop of bare skin in black and grey ink, with the key running diagonally down the upper arm.

Upper arm Shoulder Key Hand Bow Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The key came up with the pear roots, black with clay, its bow so worn it had gone the colour of wet slate. My father walled that garden himself the year the pit closed, and in forty years he never once dug deeper than a spade's length along the south wall. I should have left it where it lay. Instead I scraped the mud from the ring with my thumbnail and found fingers worked into the iron, knuckles and nails curled round the loop as if something had held on hard while the ground closed over it.

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The teeth were the strange part. Each one was cut with a notch like a lighthouse window, and the shaft was pitted with rust blooms that looked like lichen on old stone. Mrs Ackroyd from the cottage said it was a door key, the sort for a gate nobody used any more, and that the garden had been a churchyard before anyone thought to plant pears in it. I didn't tell her I had already tried it in the iron gate at the bottom of the lane, and that it turned without a sound.

Beyond that gate the lane ran on between the same walls, but the pears hung heavy and gold, and the sky over the moor had the faint green of a bruise. A woman in a grey coat sat on the bench by the water butt, shelling peas into her lap, and she looked up at me without surprise. "You've brought it back, then," she said, and held out her hand, palm up, fingers bent like a hook.

I laid the key across her palm. The iron ring tightened round my own fingers the way a latch catches, and I found I could not let go.