Realistic clock face with Roman numerals and interlocking gears, with teal and red watercolour splashes, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clockwork gears and watercolour splashes on back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch dial with Roman numerals sits at the centre, surrounded by large toothed gears that overlap the edges of the design. The clock and gears are rendered in greyscale shading with fine detail on the movement and hands, while loose teal and red watercolour splashes spread around the outside. The design fills the centre of the upper back, with the splashes adding colour to an otherwise black and grey piece.

Realism Back Clock Pocket watch Gear Cog Roman numeral Watercolour splash Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want to hear about Harrow's clock, the one that hung in the hollow where the beeches stop and the village begins, because it ran backwards the whole of one November and nobody in Thornbury Ash could say why. Old Mab Tillery kept the key to it. She wound it every Sunday with the church bell still ringing in her ears, and the gears clacked round like a mill wheel in a gale.

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The summer Mab's son went off to the sea, the splashes started. Not paint, mind. Teal like the pond under the alders, red like the rowan berries that stain your fingers, and they came off the dial in drops and stuck to the bark. The foresters swore the wood bled colour. Mab only said the hands were trying to catch up with what they'd left behind, and that a clock wants feeding the right hour or it grinds out the wrong one.

On the first frost she opened the case with a hairpin and a candle. Inside, the movement sat like a sleeping hedgehog of brass wheels, and every tooth on every gear was counting something else. She turned the minute hand forward, slow as a cart, and the dulled Roman numerals began to shine. Thirty years of rust fell away like old skin. Down the lane a gate creaked, and a boy's boots came up the path, muddy and loud.

The village still tells it that the clock ran forward that night, and that the boy came home with the sea still in his hair. Mab never said whether she'd wound the time or only unwound it. She just went to bed and left the key in the lock, for anybody who cared to try.