Black ink blackwork tattoo of a clock face with splashing and dripping ink on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clock face with ink splash on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a clock face with its hands set near the lower right, drawn as a ring of solid ink. Above the clock, the ink breaks into a rising splash with drips and fine speckles that appear to extend the outline. The piece is in black and grey only and sits on the inner forearm against a dark background.

Blackwork Forearm Clock Clock face Ink splash Ink drip Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vessel had started to weep on the third morning after the Ides, a thin bead from a crack no wider than a barley grain, and by the time I climbed the scaffold with my tallow lamp the water had found its way down the bronze face of the dial in dark tongues. Lysandros the bronze-smith swore the flaw was in the metal. I swore it was in the hands that had soldered it, which were his own cousin's, and the two of them had not spoken since the feast of Demeter.

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Setting the hands was the real trouble. The shadow had crept past the eighth hour while we argued, and the wage-men of Piraeus would be queuing in the agora on a clock that insisted it was still the ninth. I took the iron pointer from its hook and worked it round the face by feel, the way my father taught me to read a tide, until the line of the hour sat square against the rim and the drips stopped running into the numerals.

On the last morning the cistern ran clear. Lysandros climbed up beside me, out of breath, and stood looking at the dial as though it had insulted him. Then he laughed, not kindly, and pressed a coin into my palm for the hours I had lost on his cousin's solder. He had been right about the crack. I had been right about the hands. Neither of us said so, and the water went on falling into the bronze cup, one drop after another, as if it had never once been in doubt.