Shaded pencil drawing of an ornate key with a city skyline in its shaft and script lettering, a tattoo design on a sketchbook page.

Ornate key with city skyline

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of an ornate key on a sketchbook page. The shaft is formed by a city skyline with tall towers, and the bow has elaborate scrolling filigree around a diamond-shaped centre. Script lettering runs diagonally beside the key, and the greyscale shading gives the drawing a soft, rounded look.

Neo-trad Lettering Key Skyline City Scrollwork Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the years when the river was the border, a locksmith named Tomas Ferrar worked in a cellar in the lower town, making keys for people who had lost their own. He cut his bows with scrolls like frost on a window, and he shaped every shaft after the towers he could see from his bench through the grating: the bell tower, the mill chimneys, and the three spires of the cathedral on the far bank.

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One winter a woman came down the steps carrying a box with no lock on it. She said the box belonged to her brother, who had gone over the bridge to the city of towers and had not written since. She wanted a key for a door she had never seen. Tomas told her a key must have a door to fit, and she said then he would have to make one. He sat with the box all night, and at dawn he had a key whose shaft was the skyline itself. In the bow, where the diamond sat, he scratched a line of words in his neat hand: Open up your dreams.

The guard at the bridge that spring was a hard man who took every key from every traveller and weighed it in his palm. He held up the woman's key and laughed at the towers, saying a key shaped like a city was a key to nothing. But when he turned it over, the words caught the lamplight and he read them twice, moving his lips. He let her through without a word, and he kept the key in his hand a while longer than he needed to.

The guard's grandchildren said the key hung for years on a nail above the booth, and that anyone crossing with a heavy heart could borrow it for the length of one walk. The key is gone now. The nail is still there, worn bright where a hand has rested on it.