Black and grey tattoos on an upper arm and a thigh of a kneeling woman in a red corset, black gloves and fishnet stockings, shown in a black and white photograph.

Tattooed arm and thigh in a red corset

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman kneeling in a red corset, black gloves and fishnet stockings, with her head cropped out of frame. Black line and shading tattoos include a banner-style design with script and a padlock-like shape on the upper arm, a small mark on the chest, and floral or leaf-like designs on the thigh. The image is largely greyscale with the red corset as the only strong colour, and the dark backdrop focuses attention on the body.

Upper arm Chest Thigh Woman Corset Banner Padlock Script Floral Glove

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Ansel Rook had made padlocks for the wool market at Calder Cross for forty years, and he never sold one without asking what the buyer meant to keep out. Most said thieves. A few said their husbands. The ones who said nothing he gave the plain brass ones, because a silent customer usually had nothing worth locking.

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The lock that came in one wet March was different. A woman brought it in a cloth bag, a heavy iron thing with a ribbon scroll cast round the shackle and words raised along the band that he could not read at first for the rust. She wanted it opened, not made. He asked what was inside. She said a letter, written in a hand she no longer trusted, and that she had not yet decided whether to burn it.

He took the lock to his bench and worked the wards with a fine pick all afternoon, swearing softly at the spring. When it gave, the shackle sprang up like a wren off a fence post. Inside the box there was no letter, only a sprig of dried rosemary tied with red thread and a small brass key that fitted nothing in the valley.

She laughed when she saw it, and Ansel understood then that the lock had never been for keeping anything in. She paid him in coppers and took the key. He set the empty iron on his windowsill, where the morning light came through its open shackle and lay across the bench in thin, careful bars.