Realism style forearm tattoo of Big Ben in black and grey shading beside a colour Union Jack flag, shown in two side by side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Big Ben and Union Jack on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the clock tower commonly known as Big Ben, rendered in detailed black and grey shading with a clock face, stonework and spire. Below it, a waving Union Jack is drawn in red, white and blue colour with soft folds in the fabric. The two photos show the same forearm from slightly different angles against a tiled floor.

Realism Forearm Clock Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourth floor believed the clock was wrong until Nurse Adaeze Parr heard it strike two at a quarter past three. She was counting syringes at the station when the bell came through the glass, thin and late, the way it always came through a closed window in March. Big Ben stood across the river with its face lit from inside, and Parr had walked past it for eleven years without once looking up.

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Old Mr Halloran in bed nine said the clock had run slow since his father's day. He said that if you listened properly, the hour came before the bell, and that the tower only ever kept true time for people still on the right side of it. Parr thought the morphine was talking. She wrote the time in the log anyway, and the next night the bell struck two again at three.

On the last night of the month a boy came up from Accident and Emergency with a broken wrist and a fever. His mother kept asking what time it was, as if the answer might change something. Parr took her to the window and pointed at the tower, its hands black against the gold, and said it was whatever time the old clock decided. Then she set her own watch back by an hour, sat with the boy until his breathing slowed, and waited.

At four the bell rang out, clean and exact, and the ward lights came up to their proper brightness. Halloran was snoring. The boy's fever had broken. Parr went to the window and saw the flag below the tower hanging limp in the wind off the river, and for once she thought the old clock had given something back.