Realism style tattoo sleeve on the upper arm with grey shaded roses, a gold keyhole, scrollwork and a butterfly over faded script.

Roses, keyhole and scrollwork on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large sleeve tattoo covers the upper arm, with shaded roses at the top and centre, a butterfly on the right and a dark ornate keyhole at the centre. Acanthus-style scrollwork frames the design, and faded handwriting sits in the background behind the motifs. The roses and scrolls are rendered in soft black and grey shading with strong contrast, while the keyhole is picked out in gold and the background has a brownish tint.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Rose Keyhole Scrollwork Butterfly Script Sleeve

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 letters came over on the Tuesday boat, tied with garden twine and smelling of the sea. My uncle Ewan had kept the forge at the top of Skerry Lane for forty years, cutting keys for every door on Hallow Island, and nobody had ever asked him for a key to a door that wasn't there. This one was asked for in a hand I didn't know, on paper gone the colour of weak tea.

Keep reading

Inside the last envelope was a pressed rose, brown at the edges, and a little drawing of a keyhole with a fleck of gold leaf stuck beside it. The writer said the key had gone into the harbour in 1962, that her husband had thrown it there himself after a quarrel, and that she wanted the lock opened before the house was sold. She had written the address of a cottage on the north shore, Gull Rest, and under it a list of things she had meant to say.

I walked out with my bag of blanks and my good file. The cottage door had been painted so many times the lock was buried under green. I worked the brass with a pick while the tide crept up the shingle, and the old tumblers gave one by one, as if they had been waiting. Inside, every wall was papered in the same faded script as the letters, and a butterfly cut from dried paper had been pinned above the hearth.

There was no key in the house. There was a tin of them, two hundred at least, each tagged with a name and a year, and the newest tag was in my uncle's cramped writing. He had cut a copy for her every spring since the quarrel. I stood there a long time with the door swinging onto the wind, and understood that he had never been keeping her shut out, only keeping the way ready.