Small black fine line tattoo of a skeleton key on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Small skeleton key on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small ornate skeleton key with a looped bow and a notched bit sits diagonally across the inner wrist. The outline is thin and crisp, with a little shading in the bit and along the shaft. The tattoo is in black ink on pale skin, with a softly blurred background and the subject centred in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that, I'm getting to the key. The Halloran and Pye Travelling Circus had nine painted wagons when it wintered at Skelmersdale, and every one had a lock, though nobody ever stole anything worth the bother. Ezra Pye kept the takings in an iron box under his bunk and wore its key on a loop of green wool round his neck. When the bailiffs came that March he was dead in his chair, the wool snapped, the key nowhere to be found.

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Nell Ashby, who sold programmes at the gate, went looking for it on her knees in the sawdust. She found it in the seam of the blue costume he'd worn for the Tuesday matinee, slipped through a hole in the lining. It was small and black, with a looped bow and a notched bit, and it turned the box lock with a sound like a cough.

Inside there was no money. There were thirty-one brown envelopes, each with a name in Pye's careful capitals and a week's wages put by since the summer crowds stopped coming. The clowns, the tightrope pair, the boy who fed the elephant. Nell's own name was on the last envelope, and it was the thickest of them all.

She carried the lot out to the car park where the rest were waiting in their coats, and she read the names aloud the way Pye used to read the running order. Nobody spoke until the last envelope was handed over. The key went round Nell's neck on its green wool, and it still turns anything you hand it.

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