Realism tattoo of a shaded skull with a pocket watch set in one eye socket, with Roman numerals on the watch face and wispy ribbons across the skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic skull with pocket watch

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the frame, with a pocket watch with Roman numerals set into its right eye socket and a smaller round form in the left socket. The skull is rendered with smooth grey shading, deep black cavities, bright highlights on the teeth and bone, and thin wisps curling across the design. The composition is close and centred on the skull, with the watch face as the lightest focal point.

Realism Skull Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Ribbon Teeth

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and cold sausage rolls when the watch began to tick again. Nobody had wound it. Maud Pritchard, who had come forty miles to stand under the same wooden beams she had skipped beneath as a girl, said so twice, and then stopped saying anything, because the hands had moved from ten to a quarter past.

Keep reading

Everyone in the village knew the story of the Ashby school clock. Ada Pyke kept it wound for thirty-one years, and when the Board closed the place in 1968 she took the clock's pocket watch home instead, saying the children had taken enough from the school already. She died with it in her apron pocket. The village said the watch had been set into her face after the funeral, because a clock should never sit idle while the living were still at their lessons.

Maud had paid no mind to the legend until old Frank Holloway, who had never once been on time, set down his tea and asked who had brought the register. Somebody had. Thirty-two names, all of them still breathing, and beside each one a small tick in the margin where a child had been marked late.

Frank read them aloud. At every name the watch crept forward a minute. By the time he reached his own, the hall had gone quiet, and the hands sat exactly on the hour the bell had rung for the last time. Somebody in the corner laughed, and Maud realised it was her.