Black and grey realism tattoo of a Roman numeral clock face above a skull and an ornate key on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clock, skull and key on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic tattoo covers the forearm, with a pocket watch style clock face showing Roman numerals at the top. Below it, a shaded human skull sits above a second skull and an ornate key, with a further clock mechanism faintly visible behind the design. The work uses smooth, detailed greyscale shading and high contrast highlights against a dark, softly blurred background.

Realism Forearm Clock Roman numeral Skull Key Pocket watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The longcase clock in Mr Abernethy's back room had stopped at twenty to four, and nobody in Hebden Bridge had thought to wind it since the funeral. Nell found it that way on the Tuesday, when the solicitor sent her up the narrow stairs with a cardboard box and a list written in pencil. Item fourteen read simply: clock, do not sell.

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The key was in the bottom drawer of the bureau, wrapped in a handkerchief gone yellow at the corners. It was iron, longer than her palm, with a bow worked into a scroll like the curl of a fern. Someone had tied a luggage tag to it. The tag said, in careful capitals, FOR THE CASE. NOT THE HOUSE. Nell turned it over twice and then carried it downstairs, because she had never in her life left a puzzle alone.

The lock on the clock's trunk door was older than the key, and the key fitted it as if it had been filed to match. Inside, behind the pendulum, lay a second movement no larger than a biscuit tin, its wheels blackened with age, and beneath it a square of paper. Mr Abernethy had written: Wind the small one first. It only keeps time for people who remember to come back.

She wound it until her wrist ached. Somewhere under the floorboards the old works groaned, the hands shuddered past twenty to four and kept going, and when the chime finally struck, Nell realised she had been holding her breath for the whole of the hour. The box for the executors stayed on the bureau, unpacked. She set item fourteen aside and wrote, in pencil beneath it, kept.