Traditional flash design of a red rose, a grey key and a tan Bad Wolf banner with dark green leaves, shown on a black surface beside a coin for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and key with Bad Wolf banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A printed tattoo design on white paper showing a red rose with a grey key laid across its stem and leaves. A tan scroll banner reading BAD WOLF sits across the lower half, with dark leaves and dotted lines beneath it. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional flash, and the design is photographed on a black leather surface.

Traditional Rose Key Banner Leaves Dot

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

Mrs Dorothy Pask had kept the key-cutting counter at the back of Holloway's ironmongers for thirty-one years, and she could tell a stolen key from an honest one by the weight of it in the palm. The boy who slid the brass across to her on a wet Thursday in March weighed nothing at all, which was the first thing that troubled her.

Keep reading

"Cut me two," he said. "Same as this one. Don't ask whose house."

She didn't ask. She fitted the blank into the machine, let the wheel whine, and watched the copper dust fall on the scarred oak like a little drift of pennies. Outside, rain ran down the window beneath the painted sign, and a bus sighed at the stop. He kept glancing at the door as if someone had told him it would bolt.

When the copies were done she held the original up to the strip light. The bow was worn almost smooth, but someone had scratched a rose on one side and, on the other, two words in a hurry: BAD WOLF. It was the sort of mark her late husband had called a sailor's joke, the kind of thing lads put on the things they meant to lose.

"Who's the wolf, then?" she asked.

He looked at her properly for the first time. "Me, Mrs Pask," he said. "I'm the one who's been bad." He laid a ten-pound note beside the keys, then, after a moment, a second one, and she pushed the change back across the counter without a word.