Realism tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a shattering clock face, a staircase and a small figure climbing towards a red-orange sky.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shattering clock and stairway to a figure

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large clock face cracks and breaks apart at the top of the design, with fragments flying off into the sky, while a long staircase leads up towards it. A small figure in a dress walks up the steps in the centre, and Roman numerals appear on the clock and on a stone-like ledge beside the stairs. The shading is detailed, with heavy black and grey tones on the clock and stairs, set against a soft orange and red sky.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Clock Woman Figure Roman numeral Sky Horizon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother said the clock on Hollin Pass had stopped the winter the bridge fell, and that nobody who climbed the stairs beneath it came down the same height they went up. I didn't believe her. I was nine, and I had counted the steps myself, two hundred and twelve of them, cut into the scree by men who wanted a shortcut to the monastery and gave up halfway.

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The clock stood at the top of the rock like a moon that had dropped out of the sky. Its face had split across the Roman numerals, and pieces of it lifted in the wind and went spinning into the orange dusk. Father said it was only glass and rust. But the hour hand still pointed at ten to four, and it had pointed there every evening of my life.

I went up the steps the night after the storm, carrying the lamp we used for the goats. Halfway, a woman in a pale dress was climbing ahead of me, her back to me, never turning. I called out and she did not answer. Each time I looked up, the stairs seemed longer, the dark treads and grey treads trading places under my boots, and the VI carved into the ledge beside me seemed to watch me pass.

At the top, the broken face hung so close I could see the gears through the split, dull and worn to teeth. I reached for the hand, and a shard of glass cut my palm and came away warm. When I looked down, the woman was gone, and so was the pass. I had climbed for what felt like an hour, yet the lamp was still lit and I was standing on the first step again, and the clock, I saw, had not moved at all.