Black fine line tattoo of a Roman numeral clock face with silhouetted figures, framed by three roses and leaves, on the outer thigh of a person in shorts.

Clock and roses on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of an ornate clock face with Roman numerals and hour and minute hands, set over a faint mandala-like centre. Small dark silhouetted figures sit on the clock face, and three roses with leaves and buds frame the lower and side edges of the design. The linework is fine and even with light dot shading, and the design is shown in black and grey on a bare thigh with a plaid shirt and dark shorts visible.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Clock Rose Leaves Roman numeral Silhouette Bud Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in the harbour tower had been running slow since the spring, and Mrs Ardagh said it was because her husband had taken the key to sea with him. Nobody in Carrick Bay believed that, but nobody argued either. Every morning the boats went out past the breakwater on the ebb, and every evening the women stood along the wall and counted hulls against the last of the light.

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Tomas Reel kept the tower keys and the roses. He grew them along the north wall of the chandlery, red ones that stubbornly kept flowering in the salt wind. When the fleet came up eleven short one November, he climbed the tower stair with a file and a tin of oil, and found the mechanism full of small dark shapes pressed into the brass, men in oilskins with their caps pulled low, as if someone had cut them out of the night and dropped them among the gears. Nobody had put them there.

He oiled the wheels. He filed the bent pin that had stopped the minute hand. Then he sat with his back against the cold stone and told the clock, plainly, the name of every man who had gone out and not come home, one by one, until the hour came round. The hand jumped forward a notch, and then another, and along the wall the roses lifted their heads toward the water.

Two boats came in on the flood before dawn, one with a torn sail and a boy asleep on a coil of rope. Nobody counted the rest. Tomas kept the clock wound after that, and the women went home at dusk without looking back at the sea.