Realistic colour tattoo of a melting gold clock with Roman numerals and a cracked face, sitting across the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Melting clock on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A realistic tattoo of a soft, melting clock draped over the shoulder and upper arm, with a gold frame, Roman numerals and a cracked dial that reveals dark gear shapes. The shading is smooth and detailed, with bright blues, yellows and pinks on the clock face and soft grey shadows beneath it. The clock fills most of the frame against a plain light grey top.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Clock Roman numeral Gear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in the lamp room had started melting the winter after the Nine Pit flooded, and nobody in Cwm Dyffryn was willing to say it out loud. It hung on a nail beside the cage shaft, a brass-framed thing the colliery had bought from a jeweller in Merthyr, and each year it sagged a little further over the nail, like wax left too near the fire. The gold had flaked to the colour of old toffee. Men touched its frame for luck on the way down and never looked at its face.

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Mam sent me up with a tin of oil and a screwdriver the spring I turned fourteen, because I was the only one not frightened of the thing. The glass had cracked clean across the dial, and through the split the works showed: black teeth of gears grinding against each other with no sense to them. The numerals had slid. The three had crept halfway to the four, and the nine dripped off the edge towards the floor. When I laid my thumb on the glass it was warm, as if someone had been holding it all night.

I didn't oil the works. I sat on an upturned bucket and watched the minute hand creep backwards while the cage came up on its cable, bringing the day shift out into the light. Dad's cap came off first, then his grey face, and he glanced at the clock on his way past and gave the short laugh he kept for things he couldn't mend. He had been dead eleven years. I had buried him under a bank of wet grass. "Still going, then," he said, and the cage bell rang once below us for a man who was already home.