Black and grey skeleton key tattoo with the word Home written in script inside the ornate bow, on a lower limb.

Skeleton key tattoo with Home script

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single ornate skeleton key runs vertically down the skin, with the word Home in cursive script set inside the decorative bow at the top. The key has solid black outlines, smooth grey shading along the shaft and bit, and small highlights that suggest metal. The plain skin background and centred composition keep the design as the clear focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the booth turns the key over under his lamp as if it might be a weapon or a lie. "What's it open?" he asks, and you tell him the truth, which is that nothing has been open for eleven years. The door on Harcourt Street was sold to a dentist. The brass plate with your grandmother's lodgers' names came off with a screwdriver you never returned.

Keep reading

He holds the bow up to the light, where HOME is worked into the scrolled iron in a loop of cursive, and he frowns at it the way people frown at a sentence they cannot translate. Behind you a lorry idles, its diesel rattling the glass. The queue is long and the rain has started, fine as flour, settling on the bonnet of your hire car.

"Keepsake," you say. It is not quite the answer, but the officer nods, stamps something, and slides the key back across the counter with two fingers, the way you might return a coin that has gone bad. Outside, the boot of the car is still open and the wind is pulling at the paper map on the passenger seat.

You hold the key a long time before you get back in. Its bit is worn smooth on one side from the hand that used to turn it, and on the other a thumb has filed a groove where the old lock never let go. You slide it into the ignition, where it fits perfectly well, and drive on with the engine running and nothing locked behind you.

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