Pencil drawing of a hooded grim reaper skull holding a pocket clock with Roman numerals, with smoky shading on sepia paper.

Grim reaper holding a melting clock

Black and grey · Flash

A hooded grim reaper with a skull face holds a clock with Roman numerals in its bony hand, and the clock face drips downward. The drawing uses soft graphite shading for the hood and smoke, with hard dark lines around the eye sockets and teeth. The image is almost entirely grey tones on a warm sepia paper background.

Grim reaper Skull Hood Clock Roman numeral Smoke Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bells of St Oswin's had stopped at a quarter past eleven, and by the time Mabel Rook reached the tower the lamps along Tanner Row had gone out one by one, as if someone were walking down the street pinching them. The verger had locked the door. She went round by the coal hatch, as her father had taught her to do with any lock that was not its own.

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Inside, the great clock was running backwards. Its hands crept round the face anticlockwise, and the brass numerals had gone soft, sliding down the case like wax left in a sunny window. A tall figure in a grey hood stood at the mechanism with one bony hand resting on the pendulum, and it did not turn when she came in. It only said, without looking up, that the town owed it three hundred and eleven hours and it had come to collect what could be spared.

Mabel had mended every clock in Tanner Row since she was nine. She knew the sound of a stopped heart in a case, and she knew a debt of time could be paid in other coin. She offered the watch her husband had carried to the Somme, its back engraved with his initials. The figure weighed it in its fingers a long while. Then it set the watch on the bench, and where the hands had been, two slow drips of silver ran down the dial.

Morning came. The bell rang at six, true and bright. Nobody in Tanner Row ever learned how long the night had been, only that the clocks agreed with one another again, and that Mabel Rook kept a second lamp burning in her window until she died, for a visitor who had not yet asked for her.