Script quote along the ribs
Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo
Two lines of cursive script in black ink run across the side of the torso, with the first line above the second. The linework is fine and even, with the letters joined in a handwritten style and some slight variation in stroke weight. The text is set against plain skin, with the photograph taken close up and straight on.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The fair came over Hob Down at Michaelmas with three caravans, a steam organ and a showman named Ezra Pell, who sold clocks that ran backwards. Nell Harrow, who painted the carousel horses, was the only one in the field who ever bought one.
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She kept it on the shelf above her bed in the wagon, where it ticked the wrong way while the rest of the fair slept. Each night she wound it and told it the day's news: which grey horse had lost a flake of gilt, which boy had won a goldfish he could not carry home, which of the men had gone quiet in the beer tent. Ezra found the habit odd but never said so. He only asked her, once, what the clock was for.
"Every heart that leaves a place has to be kept by someone," she said, "or it wanders off after the wagons." He laughed, and then he didn't, because he had seen how she set the hands each evening with her whole face bent close to the brass.
In December the fair folded itself into the lorries and went south without her. The field was white and the gate was open. On the sill of the empty wagon she found the clock stopped at a quarter past four, and scratched into the back of its case in Ezra's neat hand were the words he had never spoken aloud: keep a close watch. She wound it, and it began again, running backwards, toward the spring.
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