Ornate key with Family script on thigh
Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo
A vintage-style key with heavy scrollwork at the bow and a heart-shaped keyhole at the bit is shaded in black and grey. The word Family in flowing cursive runs down the shaft beside the key, and the tattoo sits on the outer thigh of a cropped, close photograph against a checkered floor.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Pass me that tin, and mind the hook on the end of it. No, the other end, you daft article. Right. Now sit still, because this is the true version, the one my grandmother told on the slip at Coldharbour with the tide coming in over her boots, and I've never told it wrong since.
Keep reading
There was a key in our family, iron and black as a kettle, with a bow curled like the bracken on the hill behind the chapel. Its bit was cut in the shape of a heart, which my great-great-grandfather thought a fine joke on the lock-maker. It opened the net loft above the Gull Inn and nothing else. When the Dorothy Ann went down off the Scar in the winter of the big swell, they brought back her hull and none of her crew, and the widows had to decide who would keep the loft, because the spare sails and the boys' boots were kept up there.
Mary Tallis had the key that year, and she wouldn't turn it. She sat on the step with it in her lap for three days, while the gulls fought over the herring heads in the gutter. Then her youngest came up the lane with a crab in a bucket and asked why the door was shut. Mary said the loft was full of other people's grief. The boy said, Mam, it's full of our sails, and she laughed so hard she cried, and then she got up and opened it.
Now give me that bucket, and hold the line steady while I bait it.
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