Black blackwork flash design of an ornate key with a castle-topped bow, a heart cut-out and the words Open Up Your Dreams in script.

Ornate key with castle bow and script

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black key silhouette with a castle-battlement bow that has a heart cut out of it, a long shaft and an ornate scrolled bit. The script phrase Open Up Your Dreams runs diagonally beside the shaft in thin black lettering. The design uses only black on white with bold solid fills and open scrollwork, and it is shown without any body placement.

Blackwork Key Castle Heart Scrollwork Script Lettering

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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 step, love, it's worn hollow from a hundred years of boots. Now, you want the one about the locksmith's daughter in the city of Harrowgate, where the castle was made of nothing but chimney pots and wishes. Her father forged keys for every door in that town, and every one of them had a little heart punched through its bow, so the owners would know the key was made with care and not with spite.

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The night the river froze solid, a stranger came up Tallow Lane with a bag of old iron on his back and asked her to make him a key to a door that did not exist yet. She did not laugh. She took the iron, heated it red in the forge until the sparks climbed the walls like starlings, and she hammered out a shaft as long as her arm. For the bit she cut scrolls, curl after curl, the way frost grows across a window, and she left one dark diamond in the middle so the lock would have something solid to hold on to.

When she was done, the stranger turned the key over and read the words she had scratched beside the shaft with a nail: open up your dreams. Then he went out into the snow without a word, and in the morning the chimney pots on Tallow Lane had been stitched together into towers, and every window in the city had a lamp lit behind it, and nobody could say who had lit them, though the locksmith's daughter always smiled when the question came up at the market.