Black ink and pencil sketch of an ornate key with filigree scrollwork and a foliage vine, drawn as a tattoo design on white paper.

Ornate key with scrollwork design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed sketch of an ornate key, with a decorative bow of scrolls and a heart motif at the top and a bit with a spade-like cut at the base. Fine hatched linework builds the shaded wood-grain texture of the shaft, and loose foliage scrolls and vines wrap around it. The drawing is in black ink with grey pencil and brown wash on a plain white background, centred vertically on the page.

Key Scrollwork Filigree Foliage Vine Heart Spade

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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 padlock on the net store had rusted shut in my father's time, and nobody in Newlyn had a key that would turn it. So when Tom Harker's widow pressed his old ring into my palm at the wake, saying the fleet would want the store open before the spring boats went out, I took it without asking why something so small felt so heavy.

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It was not small, not really. The bow was a whorl of iron scrollwork with a heart pierced near the top, the sort of thing a jeweller might sell to a sailor's sweetheart, and the shaft was carved to look like driftwood stripped by a hundred winters. The bit ended in a cut like a spade. I stood in the drizzle on the quay, turning it over, until Ellen from the chandlery came down the steps with her hood up and said, "Well, are you going in or are you going to admire it?"

The lock gave with a sound like a dropped spoon. Inside, the air smelled of creosote and wet hemp, and there were no nets at all, only a long shelf of ledgers, each dated and stamped with a boat's name. Tom's hand was on every page. Beside the catches ran columns of small, regular sums paid each quarter to a name I half remembered: Joan Penhale, whose husband had gone down with the Mary Ann in 1974. Twenty-six years of postal orders, and Tom had never once mentioned it at the Ship.

I hung the key on the nail beside the tide table, where he would have hung it. Then I took down the newest ledger, opened it to a blank page, and began writing the spring figures in his place.