Two photographs of the same tattoo, an ornate heart-shaped padlock with a key hanging from a ribbon, shown on the side of the abdomen and on the top of the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Padlock and key on hip and foot

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a heart-shaped padlock with ornate filigree scrollwork and a keyhole, with an ornamental key hung from a loose ribbon. The padlock is shaded in purple on the left photo and in gold on the right, with grey shading giving the metal a rounded, three-dimensional look. Both photos are close crops of bare skin with the design centred on the frame.

Other Padlock Key Ribbon Filigree Heart Keyhole

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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

Sit down by the oven, love, the stool is warm and the bread won't be out for an hour yet. You want the story of the Verity sisters' padlock, so I'll tell it while Mr Okafor's dough rises under its cloths. Their grandmother kept a bakery on Tanner Lane, and she locked her sugar and good cinnamon in a tin box with a heart-shaped padlock, scrolled all over like a Sunday hat. The key hung on a faded blue ribbon round her neck, and she never once let it touch the flour.

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Every dawn she unlocked that tin before the lamps were lit, and every dawn one of the girls was crouched beside her, pretending not to watch. The eldest, Ada, learned to measure by the sound of the key turning. The youngest, Mae, learned to lie by the sound of it too, because she was the one sneaking out a spoonful of sugar and putting the lid back crooked.

Then came the winter the ribbon rotted through. Grandmother hung the key on a nail above the proving drawer and said nothing for three days. On the fourth morning Mae climbed up in the dark, took it down, and found the tin already open. Ada had been there first. The sugar sat in two neat piles with a note under the lid: one for you, one for me. Neither of them ever said who had been stealing from whom.

Mind the oven door on your way out. That key is still on the nail, love, and nobody in this shop has needed to lock anything since.