Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing a clock face with Roman numerals, gears and a mask within ornate scrollwork.

Ornate clock and mask on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm, centred on an oval clock face with gears and mechanical details. Roman numerals sit along the lower edge, and a mask-like face is worked into the ornate filigree below the dial. Dense shading and fine scrollwork frame the design from top to bottom, with a light background of skin around the edges.

Upper arm Clock Gear Roman numeral Mask Scrollwork Filigree Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hands had stopped at twenty to four, and Mr Halloran insisted that was the hour the mask had been finished, not the hour anyone had died. He wiped the brass with a chamois the colour of weak tea and would not let me touch the dial. 'Gears are honest,' he said. 'It's the face that lies.'

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The commission came from a widow in Clerkenwell who wanted her husband's clock mended and its case returned with the old scrollwork restored. Halloran took it, and I learned to cut the filigree with a jeweller's saw while he sat by the window with a glass pressed to one eye. Behind the oval plate there was a second plate, pierced like lace, and behind that a mask of pale wax gone the colour of old piano keys. Roman numerals ran along the lower rim, each one a little crooked, as if the maker had been counting with a shaking hand.

On the last Friday the widow came for it. Halloran wound the movement and set the hands, and the mask's eyelids lifted a hair, the way a sleeper's do before waking. She did not scream. She laughed, short and dry, and asked what she owed. He named the price she had paid the first time, which was a lie, because she had bought her husband's hours and he had kept none of them.

I swept the filings into a tin that night. Halloran was already at his bench, opening a fresh case, and he did not look up when I asked whose face he was making next. 'Nobody's yet,' he said. 'Wind the spring, boy. Count the numerals with me.' I counted them, all twelve, and every one came out a little crooked in my own mouth.