Black linework tattoo of gears, pulleys and numbered mechanical parts running along a forearm and up towards the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mechanical parts diagram along an arm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A long arm extended horizontally shows a continuous black tattoo of mechanical components, including gears, pulleys, dials and rods, joined by lines and marked with small numerals like an exploded engineering diagram. The linework is bold and uniform in black ink, with no shading or colour, and the parts are spaced across the forearm and upper arm against a plain beige wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Oswin,

Keep reading

The tower clock at Harrowgate stopped on the feast of Saint Brannoc, and the Warden has sent me up the spiral stair with a lamp, a ledger and orders not to touch anything I cannot name. So I am naming things. Number one is the great drive wheel, the one with the iron teeth you once kissed for luck. Number nine is the rod that runs down the wall to the bell-hammer. Number seventeen is the dial itself, cracked across the lower quarter, which I think is why the whole thing sulked.

I found the fault at number twenty-two, a pawl no longer than my little finger, worn to a bright tongue and sitting with its spring wound the wrong way. Someone had oiled it with lard. I suspect the same someone who has been leaving bread crusts on the stair for the rats, because the rats are the only ones who visit this tower now.

Here is the odd part. When I had it free and turning in my palm, the whole train of gears behind it gave a single shiver, like a horse waking, and the minute hand jumped forward by a full quarter hour. Nobody in Harrowgate agrees on what time it is now. The baker says it is still yesterday.

I have not fixed the spring. I am writing this with the pawl in my pocket and the lamp guttering, and I find I do not want to be the one who makes the clock keep honest time again. Come home, Oswin. Bring your good pliers. Bring the number book, the one with the red spine.

Yours in ink and oil, Tobiah

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