Black and grey realism tattoo of an eye with a clock face and Roman numerals on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye and clock face with Roman numerals

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a realistic eye whose iris and pupil form the centre of a clock face, with Roman numerals around the outer ring. The linework is soft and the shading builds smooth gradients, with fine hatching in the eyelid and lashes. The design fills most of the frame in a close-up, with the clock hands crossing the iris and the skin visible at the left edge.

Realism Forearm Eye Clock Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Tully had kept the walled garden at Hollin Park for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked her to wind the clock on the south wall. It was a Thwaite and Reed, its face the size of a cartwheel, and the Roman numerals had flaked so badly by the spring of 1962 that the estate agent wanted it scrapped. Margaret went up the ladder with a tin of white enamel and a brush from her husband's paint box, and she spent three evenings on the numerals while the blackbirds argued in the yew.

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On the fourth evening the old hour hand snapped off in her palm. She stood on the ladder holding it, and beneath the dial, in the shadow of the stone, she noticed the mortar had been cut away in a neat oval. Behind it sat a glass lens the colour of wet slate. Someone had set an eye into the wall. When she leaned close, the pupil seemed to swing toward her as the last light slid across the courtyard.

She did not tell the estate agent. She rehung the clock with a new hand from the scrapyard, a little too long, so that it crossed the iris at the centre and pointed at the bench where her husband used to sit. Each evening after that she sat there and waited for the hands to move. They never did, but the lens grew clearer, and by September she could read the faint words engraved around its rim, which said only: Watch what you have kept.