Colour tattoo of three black crows, orange and yellow maple leaves and a Roman numeral clock face on a person's upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crows, maple leaves and clock on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

Three black crows in flight sit above and beside a clock face with Roman numerals and a black outline. Autumn maple leaves in orange, yellow and red surround the clock, with soft dark splashes spreading across the design. The shading is soft and painterly, with bold black silhouettes for the birds and a clear, centred clock against the warm leaf colours.

Back Crow Maple leaf Clock Roman numeral Autumn Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, sit yourselves down and mind the coal scuttle. You want to know why the clock on the winding house at Harrowby Pit still says ten to four when the shaft has been capped since before your mam was born? I'll tell you, though it's no tale for a Sunday.

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Old Walter Dunn kept that clock wound. Every Friday he climbed the iron stair with a tin of oil and a rag in his back pocket, and every Friday three crows came down off the headgear to watch him, as if they'd been paid to. The Harrowby women swept their steps and raked the maple leaves off the pit wall, because the one tree that grew out of the slag heap turned red every October like it had something to prove. Walter used to say the crows were counting the shifts.

The year of the roof fall, Walter was down the mine when the timbers went, and the clock stopped at ten to four, the minute the lamp-room bell rang out. The crows went up that night and didn't come down for a week. Then they settled on the clock face itself, black against the gold and rust of the leaves, and sat there through the dark months without moving, the way men sit on a bench waiting for news.

Walter's grandson took the tin up the stair last spring and found the works still ticking, though nobody had wound them since. Nobody's told him how. I've stopped asking. When the crows lift at dusk and the leaves come down over the cage, the hands shift on by one minute, and that's the only thing this pit has ever given back to us.