Black and grey realism tattoo on the ribs of a torso, showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals in front of a skull, with roses, a monarch butterfly, gears and scrollwork.

Pocket watch, skull and roses on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals sits over a skull, flanked by two roses, with a monarch butterfly on the left. Gears, leaves, scrolling flourishes and fragments of numerals break away at the upper right. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, with strong contrast on the watch face and soft grey gradients across the petals and skull.

Realism Botanical Ribs Pocket watch Skull Rose Butterfly Gear Roman numeral Clock Scrollwork Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in the gatehouse of Harrowmere stopped at twenty to four the winter my father climbed the tower with a lamp and a tin of oil. I was nine and not allowed on the stairs, so I stood in the wet courtyard and counted the bats that poured out of the broken eaves instead, until the lamp went dark at the top of the tower and he didn't come down until dawn.

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His hands were black with grease and his face was very calm. The numerals had come loose, he said, one at a time, as if the hours were leaving the building on their own. I found them in the nettles at the foot of the wall: a chipped X, an I as thin as a bone, a VII cracked clean through. Mother wanted them thrown in the moat. Father kept them in a biscuit tin under the stairs, and he never once let me look inside.

Years later, when the roof had gone and the castle was only a shell that visitors paid to walk round, I found the tin in the scullery. The numerals were there, and beneath them lay a pocket watch that still ran, though nobody had wound it in forty years. Its hands pointed at twenty to four. Pressed between the pages of a seed catalogue were two dried roses and a monarch butterfly, its wings open as though it had flown in through a crack and been caught by the hour.

I wound the watch that evening and set it on the sill facing the courtyard. Then I went out into the dusk and searched the nettles until I found the last missing numeral, a crooked XII, and carried it back in both hands, still warm from the sun.