Watercolour and ink tattoo design on paper showing Big Ben, a flying Peter Pan silhouette, a moon with a ship and a dark ink circle around the scene.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Big Ben and Peter Pan watercolour design

Colour · Flash

A design drawing of Big Ben's clock tower with a black silhouette of a flying figure beside it and a second silhouette below, set against a pale moon containing a ship. The tower and clock face are drawn in fine black ink with hatched shading, while the surrounding sky and moon are loose watercolour washes in purple, blue, teal and magenta. The composition is circular, with a bold ink ring framing the subject and paint splashes spreading outward.

Flying figure Silhouette Moon Ship Watercolour splash Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the oven, love, the dough won't rise for anybody who fidgets. You want to know why the big clock over the river never stops for weather? It's because of Nell Harrow, the winter the hands jammed at a quarter to four and the bell-ringers swore it was the devil. Nell was a baker's girl with flour under her nails and no patience for superstition. So she took a tin of oil and a heel of yesterday's loaf up the iron stairs, three hundred and some steps, counting every one.

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At the top, out on the ledge, a boy was sitting with his legs dangling over the whole sleeping city. He had no shadow to speak of, only a thin dark outline that followed him like a dog that had lost its nerve. He wasn't frightened of the drop and he wasn't surprised to see her. 'You're the one who can actually reach the gears,' he said. 'Everyone else only ever looks up at them.' Above his head the moon hung like a pale plate, and a painted ship sailed across its face with its sails full of cloud.

Nell oiled the wheels while he ate the bread and told her the clock only ran as long as somebody on the ground was waiting on it. Every baker who rose early, every night nurse, every cab driver going home, they kept the hours turning between them. She had thought it was just the works. He laughed and pulled a dark little key from his sleeve and gave it to her. Then the sky went grey at the edges and the first oven doors opened below, and the hands lurched forward with a sound like a cough.

When she came down, her apron was white with flour and the key was warm in her fist. The clock has been right ever since, and the tower still smells of crust if you stand under it at five. Mind the third stair, mind it now.