Black and grey fine line tattoo across a person's upper back showing clock dials, a compass, flowers and a lace-like ornament, seen from behind.

Clock dials, compass and flowers across a back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, showing a large black and grey tattoo across the upper and mid back. The design combines overlapping clock or astronomical dial faces, a compass rose, a sprig of flowers and a dense lace-like ornament with fine hanging lines below. The linework is delicate and mostly stippled and hatched in grey and black, set against a dark background.

Fine line Botanical Geometric Back Clock Compass Flower Dial Lace Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has the bell rope wrapped twice around his wrist when you come up the north stair with the astrolabe under your arm, and he tells you without turning round that the sun is four minutes late again. You have been at Hallowmere eleven weeks, long enough to know that Anselm measures everything against the sundial in the cloister garth and trusts it more than any man.

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The brothers say the old dial was cut by a monk who went blind counting stars. Its face is a ring of Roman numerals worn down to shadows, and beside it hangs the compass rose the abbot's father brought back from Genoa, its needle gone soft with rust. Each morning you find the two of them on the chapter house wall, one measuring the hour and the other the road home, and you begin to suspect the monastery keeps them side by side so no one forgets which is which.

On the feast of Saint Brendan the abbot asks you to take the lace of brass chains down from the tower and hang it beneath the dials for the visiting bishop. Your fingers bleed on the hinges. Anselm watches from the doorway, says nothing, then passes you a rag and a tin of lamp oil.

When the bell rings for vespers the shadow on the garth stone falls exactly on its line. Anselm stands in the cold, clicks his tongue once, and says the sun has finally come home.