Black and grey realism tattoo on a calf and ankle showing a woman's face looking upward, reaching hands, a skull, bare branches and Roman numeral clock markings.

Realistic woman, skull and clock on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic black and grey tattoo covers the calf and extends toward the ankle. A woman's face tilts upward among bare branches, with a hand raised beside her face and a small figure standing on a second hand below. A detailed skull sits lower on the leg, with Roman numerals and a clock-style border near the ankle.

Realism Calf Ankle Woman Face Hand Skull Branches Tree Clock Roman numeral Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock on the winding house at Hallow Pit has said ten past four since the night the cage came up empty, and nobody in the village has had the nerve to climb up and set it right. You are the only one who still walks the bank path after dark, lamp swinging, with Tom Gallacher's boy trailing at your heels because his mother sent him out after the dog and the dog has gone the way dogs go.

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The old women say the woman in the trees is the one who called the men out that night, her face turned up to the roof of the world as if she could see the seam light through the soil. Her hand is lifted beside her cheek, the way Nan Pearson held hers when the shift bell rang and she was counting heads at the gate. You don't believe in her. You have never believed in anything you couldn't put a lamp to, which is why you keep walking into the wood, where the branches reach down like fingers and the bracken hides the bones of old pit ponies.

The boy is standing on the lowest hand, the one open at the foot of the bank, arms out as if he is balancing on a plank above the drift mouth. Below him a skull grins out of the ferns and the rusted tram rail runs off into the dark. "Come down," you say, and your voice comes back off the stone sounding like someone else's.

He climbs down into your arms, cold as the rail, and the wind drops dead. Up on the winding house the minute hand jerks once and moves on past the ten. You carry him home without looking back, and next morning, when the men come up the bank with their tin cans and their quiet, the clock says twenty past four, and it is the first time in eleven years anyone has seen it move.