Black and red ink design of a Roman numeral clock with ink splatters, brush strokes and birds flying away from it, drawn on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clock with birds and red brush strokes

Mixed · Flash

The design shows a clock face with Roman numerals and hands, set against a cloud of black ink splatters. Birds fly off to the upper left, and sweeping red brush strokes cut diagonally across the clock. The white background leaves the composition open, with the clock sitting at the lower right and the birds rising toward the top left.

Clock Roman numeral Bird Ink splatter Brush stroke

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it gives way, always has since the council stopped answering letters. Sit down, love, and I'll tell you about Mrs Agnes Dunmore on the fourteenth floor of Harrow House, who kept a clock in her hallway that nobody had wound since 1971.

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Her husband Terry had put it up the week they got the keys. Roman numerals, painted by hand onto a tin face, and the hands black as a pair of scissors. When he went out on the scaffold for the window cleaners' contract and didn't come down, the clock kept its own time, or so she said. Every evening at ten to six she stood under it with a tea towel and waited for the minute hand to stop.

Then spring came and the pigeons got into the lift shaft. Dozens of them, grey and quarrelling, and one afternoon they came up the stairwell like smoke, blackening the walls. Agnes got so cross she took a tin of red gloss from the caretaker's cupboard and slapped it across the landing in long swipes, just to have something to do with her hands. The paint ran where the damp was. It looked like a fire had gone through the place, or a ribbon pulled tight.

The next morning the clock had started again. Quarter past. The birds were gone out through the top window, every one of them, scattering over the car park like someone had thrown a handful of pepper. Agnes said that was Terry's doing, having a last word. I'm not sure. But I know she never wound that clock again, and she never needed to.