Black and grey vintage-style flash sheet showing a key, crown, stag, anchor, butterfly, teacup, sailing ship, fox, camera, swallow and arrows, with no tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage flash sheet of keys, crown, ship and fox

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of separate engraved-style drawings arranged across a pale pink background with faint circular rings. The motifs include keys, a crown, a stag, a skull, a cuckoo clock, an anchor, a butterfly, a teacup, a sailing ship, a pocket watch, a fox, a camera, a swallow and a pair of arrows. Each design is drawn in fine black linework with light shading and is spaced apart so it can be chosen individually.

Key Crown Stag Skull Anchor Butterfly Teacup Ship Pocket watch Fox Camera Swallow Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The biscuit tin of keys rattled under the bench the whole way down from Lechlade, a sound Dad said he could pick out in his sleep. Every key in it belonged to a lock gate somewhere on the Thames, and the little crown-topped one was the oldest, handed down with the boat, though it opened nothing now. Mum kept it anyway, because she said a barge with no key was just a long box going nowhere in a hurry.

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We were late reaching Iffley that August. The lock keeper leant on his rail and watched us come up with the stern light swinging, and the swallows dipped low over the water the way they do before rain. Dad carried a silver pocket watch he wound every evening, a thing with Roman numerals that had belonged to his father, and it had stopped the night before at a quarter past four, which he blamed on the damp. On the far bank a fox sat grey and patient, watching the lock as if it owed him money.

The gates groaned open and the water dropped away beneath us until the hull settled onto the stone. Dad wound the watch, held it to my ear, and said it was ticking again, though I could hear nothing but the weir. He set it by the lock keeper's clock, snapped the lid shut, and told me that was the only honest time on the river.