Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with clockwork gears and a hand holding a clock face, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic skull with clockwork gears on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull with clockwork gears and a small mechanical arm fixed to its upper side dominates the design. Below it, a hand reaches out from smoky shading toward a clock face with Roman numerals. The piece uses soft, detailed greyscale shading with highlights on the bone and a faint teal tint in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mr Hallam,

Keep reading

The mist has not lifted off the Scarrow Pass in nine days, and the hostel clock has stopped again. I have taken the case apart twice and found nothing wrong with the escapement, so I have begun to suspect the weather. You will laugh, but the damp gets into the brass the way it gets into a man's knees.

The thing you asked me to keep an eye on arrived on the Tuesday carrier, wrapped in oilcloth and labelled only with a number. It is the skull, the one with the little gears set into its brow. Last night I unwrapped it by the stove and found the mechanism in the crown still ticking, slow as a heartbeat, though nobody had wound it. The minute hand of the face you sent with it had moved from the eleven to the four while the crate sat in the dark.

I did not tell the cook. I sat with the skull until the lamp guttered, and the smoke from the peat drifted across its jaw as though it were breathing. When I reached to still the small arm on its side, the gears gave a single, decisive click, the way a latch does when someone on the far side of a door has decided to let you in.

Morning showed the clock face on the hostel wall reading exactly what the skull's hand had pointed to. I have wound everything twice since. I am going to write to the carrier and ask him where the crate was really opened.

Yours in haste, Tobias Wren

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