Traditional style forearm tattoo of a clock face with a feather above, a rose below and a banner reading TIME KILLS EVERYTHING.

Clock and rose with Time Kills Everything banner

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A clock face with the numbers nine, three and six visible sits inside an orange and brown ring, with a dark feather at the top and a banner reading TIME KILLS EVERYTHING across the upper section. A dark rose with a red centre sits at the lower left, and a second banner curves along the bottom right. Bold black outlines and grey shading on the clock and rose contrast with red, orange and brown colour fills.

Traditional Forearm Clock Rose Feather Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the wheel on the Margaret Lowe has said twenty to nine since the spring gales, and Skipper Dunne swears it is only the damp. You know better than to argue with him at four in the morning, when the harbour lights are still doubled in the black water and the diesel smells like something you will never quite wash out of your coat.

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Out past the Scarrow Ledge the fleet works in a loose line, each boat hauling its own strings of pots, and you learn to read the gulls rather than the clock. One morning a grey feather snags in the mesh like a bookmark, and Tam pulls it free and tucks it behind your ear for luck. He is nineteen and thinks everything is a sign. You tell him the sea is only the sea, and he laughs at you the way young men laugh at anyone who has been out too long.

By noon the wind has swung and the bank of cloud over the Ledge reads like a warning nobody bothered to paint. The rose on the transom, faded to brick and ash, is the first thing Dunne's wife daubed there the year they bought the boat. You remember that when the swell starts to lift the stern and the buoy bell begins its slow argument with the wind. You remember too that the hours were never what frightened you.

That night you climb into the wheelhouse, slide the glass back, and reach up to the clock. Twenty to nine. You turn the little key until the spring holds, and the second hand begins to walk, unhurried, as if it has all the time in the world and has finally decided to spend some of it on you.