Black line drawing of interlocking cogs, clock hands and mechanical parts arranged in a steampunk-style design, with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clockwork gears and hands line design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows interlocking cogs of different sizes, several clock hands and small mechanical fittings arranged across the frame. It is built from clean, uniform black outlines with no shading, fill or colour. The composition is dense and spreads from the centre outwards, with the hands reaching to the upper right and lower centre.

Gear Cog Clock hand Clockwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and the same lukewarm squash it had smelled of in 1998, and I had been standing by the stage for twenty minutes trying to remember which gear in the old school clock had been the loose one. Dilys found me there with two glasses of prosecco she had not paid for.

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"They've still got it stopped," she said, nodding up at the gallery where the big brass clock hung above the honours boards. Its hands sat at ten to four. We had stopped it ourselves the summer before our exams, jamming a biro between two cogs in the back case while Mr Pettigrew was at lunch. We meant it as a joke. He never forgave us, and he never fixed it either, and somehow the school had let it stay wrong for a quarter of a century.

I climbed the stairs to the gallery with her behind me, past the framed rowing eights and the dead headmasters. The case door was not locked. Inside, the mechanism was furred with dust, but the biro was gone. In its place someone had wedged a single small cog, bright and new, and pencilled on its edge in careful capitals was PETTIGREW, and beneath it, smaller, FOR THE TWO OF YOU WHO WERE ALWAYS ON TIME.

Dilys laughed until she had to sit down on the step. I did not laugh. I put my thumb against the new cog and felt it turn, slow and stubborn, and below us the hall went quiet as someone rang a bell for the speeches. The hands above gave one tick, then another, and I understood we were late for something that had been waiting for us all along.