Black and grey realism tattoo of the Big Ben clock tower and a clock face across the back of a hand, with numerals tattooed on the fingers.

Big Ben clock tower on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the back of a hand, showing a clock tower with a clock face on its side beside a larger round clock dial with a Roman numeral XII at the top. The clock dial has detailed shading and a segmented, mosaic-like pattern, and numerals also run along the fingers and a line of text sits near the wrist. The image is in black and grey with strong contrast against a dark background.

Realism Hand Clock Roman numeral Number Clock face

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, and keep your voice low, because the watchmen on Bridge Street still listen for talk after the last bus. I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, standing where the river meets the stone steps and the lamps go yellow on the water.

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Her name was Ada Penhallow, and she mended clocks in a shop with one window, in the shadow of the tower where the great bell lived. Every night at midnight the hands of the tower stood together like two old men agreeing about nothing, and every night Ada climbed the iron stair to oil the works. She carried a tin of grease, a rag, and a pocketful of brass numbers she had cut herself, because the council would not pay to replace the ones the weather had taken.

One winter night in 1994 she found a dial that was not on the tower at all. It lay in the gutter below the parapet, round and dark as a beetle's back, its twelve marked in small brass scales like the scales of a fish. The hands had been snapped off. Ada turned it over and saw a numeral XII scratched on the rim, and beneath it a date, and beneath that a name she did not know.

She took it home and set it on her bench beside the window. The next night the great bell struck thirteen, and the whole city woke up wondering who had been counting.