Black geometric tattoo of a clock face, a key and descending dots running down the centre of a person's back.

Clock, key and dots down the spine

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of black tattoo motifs runs down the centre of the back, starting near the shoulders with a small dot, then a larger dot, a fragmented clock face, a key and a line of graduated dots that shrink towards the waist. The linework is bold and the shapes are solid black with some broken, offset strokes around the clock. The image is a close, low-angled photograph in warm, dim lighting with a plain background, and the ink appears to be entirely black.

Blackwork Geometric Back Clock Key Dot Spine Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the ticket hut had stopped at twenty to four, and nobody had the ladder or the nerve to climb up and set it right. Ada stood beneath it with the strongbox key in her fist and listened to the canvas breathe over the empty benches. Eleven people had paid for the matinee. She had counted them twice, the way her father used to count coins on the tailboard of the wagon, lips moving, before the cough took him in a boarding house in Carlisle.

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The box lived under the platform of the old horse wagon, where the damp was supposed to be kinder. The lock had gone the colour of pond water. She fitted the key, warm from her palm, and it turned with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Inside there were no wages. There was a bundle of handbills for a season that had never quite arrived, a tin whistle with its cork gone, and a photograph of Samson the lion as a cub, sitting in a straw hat that belonged to somebody's uncle.

She thought of the bulbs strung down the centre pole, lit every night for thirty years and now burning one in three. Dominic had wanted them to shrink towards the ground, so a child could count the nights left in a season by the lights going out. Ada had called it sentimental. Now she put the tin whistle to her mouth and blew one thin note, and somewhere up the field a dog barked back at it.

In the end she went up the ladder herself, the key still in her teeth, and set the hands of the clock to half past five. It was not the time anybody had paid for. But the light was going, and it was the hour the lions used to be fed, and she wanted something in the field to keep time for once.