Colour realism tattoo on a lower leg showing a man's face with clamped eyelids, orange CLOCKWORK lettering and an orange slice.

Realistic portrait with Clockwork lettering on calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A realistic portrait of a man with wide, staring eyes and metal clamps holding his eyelids open, with wire-like hardware across his head. Orange CLOCKWORK lettering runs diagonally beside the face, above a large orange slice and a red drip at the bottom. Smooth blended shading and vivid colour give the face depth against the lettering and fruit.

Realism Lettering Calf Portrait Man Clockwork Wire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell sold oranges from a barrow under the railway arch in Hollin Street, and she sold them for exactly as long as the church clock allowed. At ten to five she wiped the juice from her knuckles, sheeted the crates and walked home, because her late husband had set the clock three minutes fast and she had never once trusted it.

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Her nephew Tobias took over the barrow the winter his mother went into the infirmary. He was nineteen and thin as a bootlace, and he kept his eyes wide open at all times, as if afraid of missing a customer. Mrs Pell warned him about the clock. "Anything that ticks wants something from you," she said, and she made him count coins into a biscuit tin every evening instead of watching the hands.

He didn't listen. One February night he stayed past five, propped a lantern on the crate and watched the minute hand jump forward by itself. The clockmaker from the corner shop came out in his shirtsleeves, fingers stained from the old fruit press he used for jam, and offered a bargain: three minutes of Tobias's time back for every orange he peeled without once looking away. Tobias peeled until the street was empty and his fingers were raw and bleeding.

In the morning Mrs Pell found the barrow untouched except for one orange on the crate, its peel lifted off in a single unbroken spiral. A thin red line ran from it down the kerb to the clock tower door, and the clock, for once, showed the right time.