Colour tattoo of two melting clocks draped over a branch inside a rope-edged oval on the side of the ribs, in traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Melting clocks in a rope oval on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two melting clocks draped over a dark branch or ledge, set against a teal and orange sunset sky inside a rope-edged oval frame. The linework is bold and dark, with flat, solid colour in teal, orange, red and yellow, and simple shading on the clock faces and frame. The oval sits upright on the side of the torso, with the design filling most of the photograph.

Traditional Ribs Clock Rope frame Branch Sunset Sky Oval

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody crossed Hollin Ford at sunset, not since the customs clerk Osric Vane tried to stamp the light. He had a ledger, a brass seal and a grudge against anything that refused to be counted. When the sky over the far bank turned the colour of marmalade, he hung his watch from a dead ash branch on the spit of shingle and wrote the hour in ink, and the ink ran down the page like syrup.

Keep reading

The travellers who came over the bridge that evening were a salt merchant named Bet Rooke and her grey mule, Dunstan. Bet had crossed the ford for twenty years and knew the custom: you paid the toll in minutes, not coins. She hung her own pocket watch on the branch beside his, and the two faces softened together in the heat until they folded over the wood like pancakes left in a pan. Vane said nothing, but the brass seal had started to drip, and he had to wipe his fingers on his coat.

Bet asked him what the toll was for the light. Vane said the light was not his to sell. She said then the crossing was free, and he could keep his ledger. He tried to close it, but the pages stuck to his hands, so he sat on the shingle with the river going past, learning the hours by the smell of woodsmoke and wet stone.

After that, every dusk the mule's bell rang out across the water, and the ledger lay open on the branch, its last entry one word in running ink: passed.