Greyscale illustration of a skull with a cracked clock face on its crown, Roman numerals and red accents in the eye sockets, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and clock face design

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A rendered skull with a cracked, weathered clock face set into its top, showing Roman numerals and hands. The shading is smooth and realistic, with dark grey tones and deep shadows, and red highlights glow in the eye sockets and along the jaw. Drips run down from the base against a plain white background.

Realism Skull Clock Roman numeral Clock face Drip

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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

No, sit nearer the stove, the wind off the Skerry always finds the gap under the door. Aye, that's the clock you're squinting at. Brass once, the keeper's own, bolted above the lamp room so he'd know when to wind the great lens. Salt crept into its face over the years, and a crack ran across the numerals the winter the Mary Ann broke on the reef.

Keep reading

The keeper was a man called Tobias Rennie, and he kept that light forty years without missing a turn. When the fog came in thick as porridge, he climbed the hundred and twelve steps every quarter hour to wind the mechanism and check the hands against the bell at Kinloch. He used to say the sea would forgive a late ship before it forgave a stopped clock. Then one March night his wife's fever took her in the cottage below, and he was up the tower when it happened, winding, counting the hours to a dawn he couldn't bear to see.

He never came down again. They found him at the lamp in the morning with his hand still on the key, and the hands of that clock stood at the exact minute she went. Nobody could make them move, not the smith from Portree, not the mainland men with their oils and their tools.

So if you hear a bell tonight, and you will if the fog holds, don't go climbing the steps to help him. Count the strokes instead. He's still counting, and the hour he lost her has never once got past him. Pass me that cup, the kettle's on the boil again.