Blackwork tattoo of two solid black bands on the inner forearm, each with a key silhouette knocked out in skin tone.

Two key bands on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm, partly covered by a rolled striped shirt sleeve, carries two solid black bands wrapped around the arm. Each band has a key silhouette left as bare skin, one with the bow to the left and one with the bow to the right. The black ink is fully saturated with crisp edges, and the background shows an indoor room with soft window light.

Blackwork Forearm Key Band Stripe Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Agnes Holroyd came into the shop on Hollin Lane with a dented tin box under one arm and a question about a lock that had outlived her husband. Her hands were steady, but she kept turning her wedding ring. Idris Pell took the box to the bench, turned it over in the lamplight, and saw that the cylinder had been filed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

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The two keys had been cut from one blank, he told her, and that was the odd part. One bow faced left, the other right, so that neither would turn in the other's lock. Her brother Walter had asked for them in 1951, the year the cottage was split between them after their mother died. Each kept a key to the box. Neither could open the other's half without the other standing beside them, and in seventy years they had never once stood side by side in the shop.

Pell spent three evenings with a needle file, cutting a fresh lever to suit the old wards. On the fourth he rang her at the number on the card. She came in out of the rain, and he set the box on the counter with its lid already open, the two keys laid side by side on a folded cloth. She picked up the left-hand one and held it to the light for a long time, then put it down and picked up the right.

"Walter's dead," she said. "I suppose that means they're both mine now."

She fitted one key, then the other, and turned them together. The lid came up with a sigh of old oil, and Pell saw that the box held nothing but a single folded letter and a small brass bell with no clapper.