Black blackwork-style flash design of a central figure surrounded by a radiating ring of keyblades on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Radial keyblade design with central figure

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A central stylised figure in solid black silhouette is surrounded by a ring of keyblades arranged radially, with smaller motifs such as stars and dots scattered between them. The linework is bold and mostly solid, with some internal detail picked out in white. The design is shown in black ink on a plain light background, with no body part visible.

Blackwork Key Figure Silhouette Star

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

The eleventh key on the bench had no teeth, and Mrs Okonedo swore it was the one that had let the lamplighter's boy into the sea. Ada didn't argue. She had cut keys for the shops on Pell Street since her father's hands went stiff, and she knew a key remembered the door it was made for, even after the door was bricked over or the street renamed. Twenty-two of them hung on hooks around the workshop window, each one turning slowly in the draught from the harbour.

Keep reading

The stranger came in on the morning the gulls went quiet. He had a coat with too many pockets and a way of standing in the middle of the floor as if it were a stage. He asked for a key to the door at the bottom of the town, where the tide came in under the stones and nobody had ever found a lock. Ada told him that doors like that didn't need keys, they needed patience. He laughed and put a sixpence on the bench anyway. So she filed a blank from the old brass drawer, cut a crown into its bow, and gave him a star for its head.

They walked the ring of streets together until the lamps went out. Every lock they tried opened onto a different hour. A baker's back step became a wet afternoon in June. A chapel door gave onto a room full of dropped umbrellas and a girl humming in French. Little stars kept falling from his coat and winking on the cobbles, and by midnight the whole town smelled faintly of salt and burnt sugar.

When Ada got back to the workshop, the hook where the star-headed key had hung was empty, and the lamp in the window was still lit, though she had not lit it.