Black and grey realism tattoo of a Roman numeral clock face with exposed gears and a 3D cracked edge, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cracked clock face on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large clock face with Roman numerals, hour and minute hands, and an exposed mechanism of cogs and a central screw. The edge of the dial appears to lift and break away, with small petals or leaves falling off at the lower left. Shading is smooth and grey, with strong contrast and highlights that give the piece a three-dimensional look across the shoulder blade.

Realism Back Clock Roman numeral Gear Clock hand Cog Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at St Agnes Ward wound the clocks at ten past two, because his grandmother had told him the hour between two and three belonged to whoever was awake. There were nine clocks along the corridor and one great round dial above the lift doors, older than the building, its paint gone the colour of weak tea. The Roman numerals had been repainted so often that the X looked like a cross.

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One February a woman in bed four asked him to stop it. She had a voice like paper being folded and a paper bag of boiled sweets she never ate. 'Not the clock, love. The bit that pushes the others along.' He did not understand her. She said her husband had been a watchmaker in Sheffield and had told her that every mechanism has one wheel that does the work while the rest only follow. That night Tobias unscrewed the cover plate with a dinner knife and found a brass cog with its teeth worn to nubs, and beside it, pressed flat between the wheels, a dried rose petal as pale as a moth.

He fitted a new spring from the store cupboard, though nobody had asked him to, and told the woman the hands were moving again. She laughed and said that was not the trick at all. The trick was to leave the cover off so the petals could fall where they liked.

Ward four was quiet the following week. The petals went into the bin with the sweet wrappers, and Tobias kept the cog in his coat pocket, where it still knocks against his keys when he walks the corridor at two.