Realism tattoo on a calf of a woman's face, half skull, with a clock face with Roman numerals behind her head and a blue and orange butterfly wing over one eye.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clock and skull portrait on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman whose face is half skull, with green eyes and red lips on the living side. A cracked clock face with Roman numerals sits behind the head, and a blue and orange butterfly wing covers one eye, with dark roots and dripping lines below the chin. The shading is greyscale on the skull and clock with colour concentrated in the eye, wing and lips, and the design fills a vertical area of the calf.

Realism Calf Skull Clock Roman numeral Butterfly Root Green eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dial came up from the cellar in four pieces wrapped in a bedsheet, and Ottilie knew before she unfolded it that the crack would run through the XII. Every fault in the city's clocks ran through the XII eventually. Her uncle used to say the numerals went first because they had been painted by people who believed the hour was a kind of promise.

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The client was a ferryman's widow named Hesper Lund, who wanted the clock running before the spring tides. She had brought a photograph of the old face from the tower of Saint Brannoc's, the one that had stopped the morning the sea came over the quay wall. Its hands stood at a quarter past eleven, and under the glass someone had scratched a small butterfly, blue wings edged with orange, no bigger than a thumbnail.

Ottilie worked through the night with a loupe and a jeweller's lamp. When she fitted the cracked piece back onto the movement, she found a folded slip of paper behind the escapement, brittle as pastry. It listed the hours the tide would reach each step of the church, written in her uncle's hand. Beneath the last line he had drawn a tiny skull with roots growing out of its jaw, as if the tree under the tower had been listening all along.

At dawn she wound the mechanism and watched the minute hand jerk, then move. Hesper came in from the wet street, looked up at the dial, and asked whether it would keep time. Ottilie told her it would keep the time it had been given, which was not quite the same thing, and handed her the slip. Hesper read it, folded it back along the old creases, and went out to meet the water.