Black and grey realistic drawing of a cracked clock face breaking into shards, with a skull and fragmented faces, shown as a tattoo design.

Shattering clock and skull design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey drawing of a Roman numeral clock face cracking apart into shards and gears, with a human skull below and small faces and a cross among the broken fragments. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and graded, with heavy dark areas around the skull and clock edges. The design fills a tall, vertical composition on a pale background.

Realism Clock Skull Gear Face Cross Roman numeral

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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

Mind the third step, it always bites. Now, the clock on the roof of Harrow Court stopped the winter the lift shafts flooded, but nobody on the ninth floor believed it had stopped at all. Dessie Pryce swore he could hear it at night, the gears grinding through the plaster like a jaw working on gravel, and when the council sent him up with a hammer to shut it up, he took the stairs two at a time, cursing the whole way.

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He got as far as the glass. The face was cracked like river ice, and when he raised the hammer the whole thing split outward in a bloom of shards, and every shard held a picture: his mother at the bingo hall, a lad from the flats who went off to Afghanistan and never came back, a chapel cross with the paint half gone, a grinning photograph of a man he'd once owed forty quid. The gears came loose and rattled down the stairwell like dropped spoons. Dessie stood in the grey light with the hammer hanging by his leg and didn't swing again.

He gathered the shards into an old biscuit tin and carried them down with his coat over the top to keep the light off. Nobody ever saw the clock again. What they did see, for years after, was a man on the bench outside the launderette tapping that tin with one finger, counting something under his breath. Ask him the time and he'd tell you to the second, and he was never once wrong.