Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a cuckoo clock with a deer head, maple leaves and birds, covering the upper arm.

Cuckoo clock with deer and maple leaves on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full-sleeve style tattoo on the upper arm shows a cuckoo clock with a stag's head and antlers at the top, a clock face with Roman numerals at the centre, and two grey birds on either side. Maple leaves in orange, red and yellow frame the clock, with pinecone-shaped weights hanging below. Bold dark outlines and smooth colour shading give it a rich, layered finish against the dark background.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Deer Stag Antler Maple leaves Bird Clock face Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stairwell clock in the flats at Carrow Heights ran slow, and everyone knew it because it struck the hour after the hour was already over. Mrs Dunne on the fourteenth floor said it had come from a house in the Black Forest, carried over in a van by her husband's brother, and that the stag at the top was there to keep the forest's time. Nobody believed her, but nobody argued either.

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The autumn the sycamores dropped early, the lift broke for good and the children stopped going out to play. Pinecones came down the shaft like bad news. Tomasz, who was nine and stubborn, climbed fourteen flights each evening to hear the little door open and the bird call the hour. One night the door stayed shut. A grey bird sat on the ledge beside the clock face and tapped the glass with its beak until the hands crept backwards.

He waited on the landing while the minute hand dragged round to the twelve, and the whole block went quiet in a way it had not been since summer. Then doors opened all the way up. Mrs Dunne came out in her slippers with a jar of syrup from a cousin in Ontario, and the children came up from the car park with armfuls of red leaves from the trees that had not yet let go.

At the stroke of six the cuckoo finally leapt out, sure and on time, and the pinecone weights swung level on their chains. Tomasz had been counting every hour since August. He lost his place somewhere around four, and for once he did not mind.