Illustrated tattoo design of a face split into a woman's side and a skull, with a Roman numeral clock behind the head and a colourful butterfly wing over one eye.

Half skull, half woman with clock face

Mixed · Flash

A drawn design of a head with one half a woman's face with lips and an eye, and the other half a skull. A Roman numeral clock face with ornate hands sits behind the head, and a butterfly wing in orange and blue covers one eye socket. Fine pencil-style linework and soft shading are used throughout, with colour limited to the butterfly, lips and small accents on a pale peach background.

Skull Clock Butterfly Face Woman Roman numeral Lip Eye Clock hand Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in Mr Abernethy's back room had stopped at four minutes to midnight for as long as anyone in Saltmarrow could remember, and Nell Carrick had been hired to make it tell the truth. She propped the longcase door open on the Tuesday, lamp hissing beside the bench, and found the movement furred with grey dust. Tucked between two brass wheels was a folded butterfly wing, orange at the tip and faded to the blue of old enamel near the body. Abernethy had told her it was there when he took the shop over, and that he had never had the heart to move it.

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She worked through the night with a pin and a squeeze bulb of clove oil, freeing the escapement one tooth at a time. Rain came sideways off the harbour and rattled the shutters. Somewhere past three the hour hand shivered, lifted, and crept across the Roman numerals toward the XII, and the wing trembled in the gears as though a draught had found it. Nell held her breath. The air in the room turned warm and smelled faintly of pennies and cut grass.

At eight, when the church bell across the cobbles rang the true hour, she set the hands to match it and wound the spring until it bit. The pendulum swung. The clock struck once, a clean note, and the wing slid free of the wheels and lay open on the bench, dull and ordinary as paper.

When Abernethy came in with his tea she said nothing about the wing. She only noticed, after he had gone back to his ledgers, that the blue had come off on her fingers, and that the clock was still ticking when she left.