Black and white photo of a small fine line key-shaped tattoo on the upper back of a person lying face down on a striped pillow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small key tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person lying face down on a striped pillow, with curly hair covering the face and an arm tucked near the head. A small, thin black linework tattoo of a key-shaped design with a loop at the top sits on the upper back, and the tattoo is the focal point against the bare skin. The soft tones and shallow focus keep the composition calm and intimate.

Fine line Back Key Heart Hair

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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

The key came up in the third turn of the bed, black with clay and no longer than my little finger. Its bow was shaped like a heart that had been pressed flat under a boot, and the shank was so fine I had to hold it to the window to be sure it was real. I put it in my apron pocket, meaning to wash it later, and forgot it until the kettle was boiling.

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Nobody at Hollin Park could say what it opened. The walled garden had been locked since the war, when the gardener Walter Abney went off to France and his wife kept the iron gate shut, out of spite or grief depending on who was telling it. I tried the potting shed, the glasshouse, the cold frame where the seed trays lived. The key slid into none of them. Mrs Pryce from the village said it was for the orchard gate, which had long since rotted off its hinges, and that it would turn for nobody now.

On Thursday I went through the old ledger in the shed and found a page of Walter's careful writing: a list of tools, the names of seedlings, and at the bottom, underlined twice, Keep the small key for Edith. I climbed the wall by the compost heap, found the orchard gate lying in the nettles, and under its rusted post a tin box no bigger than a sandwich case. The key turned in it with a sound like a held breath let go.

The box held a bundle of seed packets, each labelled in pencil with a date and one word: rose, lark, foxglove, Edith. I sowed the rose seeds that afternoon in the bed where the key had been, and I hung the little key on the nail by the door, next to the others, where it still catches the light.