Black and grey realism tattoo of a rose, a human skull and a clock face with Roman numerals, placed on the shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic rose, skull and clock on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large realistic tattoo on the shoulder and upper back, showing a rose in full bloom above a skull with a clock face curving behind it. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft highlights on the petals and skull and deep shadows around the eye sockets and under the rose. The image is entirely black and grey, and the design fills the frame against the skin.

Realism Shoulder Rose Skull Clock Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock came in on a Tuesday, wrapped in a bedsheet, its brass face gone green at the edges and its hands stopped at twenty to four. Mr Okafor from the chapel committee said nobody had wound it since his father died, and he wanted it running for the centenary. Edith took the back off with the thin screwdriver her old master had given her in 1979, and found a pressed rose tucked against the movement, brown as stewed tea, its stem tied with grey thread.

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The Roman numerals had been painted by hand, and the fours and nines leaned like tired men. Behind the escapement someone had scratched a date and a single word she couldn't read without her glass. She spent three nights cleaning old oil from teeth no bigger than barley grains, and on the third she found a folded slip of paper glued to the inside of the case. On the back was a pen drawing of a skull with a rose set over its crown, and beneath it a line in faded ink: keep her going until the bloom comes back.

Edith sat with that for a long while. Then she went down to the churchyard with a torch and a trowel and found the old rose bush by the north wall, bare and grey, with one shoot still green at the base. She took a cutting, wrapped it in damp newspaper, and carried it back up the hill in her coat.

That evening she set the pendulum swinging and the room filled with its patient tick. She propped the cutting in a jam jar on the vestry sill, where the last light would reach it, and waited for the minute hand to reach the twelve.