Black and grey shaded keyhole surrounded by ornate scrollwork, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate keyhole escutcheon on the wrist

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A keyhole set within an ornate, scrolled escutcheon plate, with leafy flourishes curling above and below. The shading is smooth and dimensional, giving the metal-like plate a raised, three-dimensional look. The design is centred on the inner forearm against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Realism Forearm Keyhole Scrollwork Flourish Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, it's worn hollow by three generations of boots. Sit by the range where the coal dust doesn't reach. Now, the Pryce lock-up on Chapel Row had a door the colour of dried blood and a keyhole plate so fancy the men called it the Bishop's Collar, because it looked like something a vicar would hang round his neck on a Sunday. Nobody had turned that key in forty years. The lock had seized with rust and pride.

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Then in the spring of the strike, a girl called Nessa Dunmore came up from the lower workings with a bent hairpin and a tin of oil her brother had nicked from the winding gear. She knelt in the wet gravel for an hour, talking to the lock the way you'd talk to a frightened dog. Her mam said she'd gone soft in the head. Old Tom Ashby said she'd gone sensible, which was worse.

What was inside the lock-up, I'll not pretend to know. Some say deeds to the pit, some say a letter from a man who never came home. Nessa only said that when the bolt finally slid back, the plate shone like new silver in the lamplight, every scroll and leaf standing proud of the iron, as if the metal had been waiting to be looked at.

She came out with her hands empty and her face wet. She never said what she'd found. But the next morning she walked into the colliery office and asked for her wages in full, and she wore that little hairpin in her hair for the rest of her days. Now mind, that's the sort of ending you only get when you're the one holding the key.