Black ornamental padlock and key flash design with handwritten script above and below, shown without any body placement.

Ornate padlock and key with love script

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of an ornate padlock with a keyhole and a matching key, both filled with dense scrolls, filigree and dot detail. Two lines of handwritten script sit above the padlock and below the key. The design is solid black on white, with the padlock as the larger focal point on the left.

Blackwork Lettering Padlock Key Keyhole Filigree Scroll Script Love

Find an artist for this

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

Don't touch that rail, boy, the salt's had it since Tuesday. Sit where I can see your hands. The lamp at Harrow Point was kept locked in my grandfather's day, and for good reason: a padlock as big as a loaf, its iron scrolled so fine the rust couldn't get into the curls. The key hung on a nail by the door, cut like a fern uncurling. Every keeper who climbed those seventy-one steps was told the same thing. Whoever holds the key holds the light.

Keep reading

Then came the winter the key went missing. Old Tom Ashby swore he'd hung it up, his wife swore she'd never touched it, and the gale that night put the lamp out for three hours. Two ships turned for the rocks and only lived because a girl called Ruth Penhale, nine years old, walked the cliff path in her nightdress with a storm lantern swinging from one hand. She reached the tower soaked to the skin and found the door already open.

Inside stood her mother, one hand flat on the great brass lens and the other holding the lost key up to the window. Maud had found it sewn into the lining of her own coat, where she'd hidden it the spring before so her husband couldn't sell the lamp oil for drink. She'd meant to tell him. She never got the chance. The light burned until dawn, and the ships came in.

Ruth wore that key on a ribbon round her neck until she was an old woman in a bungalow in Penzance. The ribbon's still hanging on my kitchen hook. Go on, lift it. Feel how light a thing can be when it's done its one job.