Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull merged with a Roman numeral clock face, with a clock hand and faint script, on an upper arm.

Skull and clock face on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cracked, shaded human skull fills the centre of the design, with its jaw open and teeth visible, and its cranium blends into a pocket watch face with Roman numerals and a hand. Fine script and a faint scribbled line run down the right side and across the lower area, on a background of soft shading. The work is entirely black and grey, using smooth gradients and high contrast to give the skull and metal a three-dimensional look.

Realism Upper arm Skull Clock Roman numeral Clock hand Script Pocket watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Carrowfield Junction would climb the ladder to wind the clock after Walter Pike fell off it in March. He broke a wrist and two ribs, and the big Roman-numbered face above platform four has said twenty to nine ever since, which the timetable board opposite insists is wrong by eleven hours and four minutes. I am the only one who laughs at that. Everyone else just checks their phones.

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I took the night shift at the junction the year my marriage ended, mostly because the night porter needed someone to sit with him and the trains did not need anyone to talk. Walter came in on Thursdays with a flask of stewed tea and a bone-handled pen, and he would sit on the bench under the clock and draw whatever he could see from there: the cracked dial, the hour hand bent like a hook, and the lettering that ran round the rim in faded copperplate. He said the hands were the only honest part of any station. They point where they are told and nowhere else.

On the last Thursday of October he handed me the sketch folded in four. It was a skull with its jaw open, sitting inside the clock face as though the hours had been poured into it. Under the teeth he had written the first stop on the Leeds line, and beneath that, in a hand that wobbled, Mind the gap.

I climbed the ladder the next morning with the winding key in my coat pocket. The mechanism was dry as a biscuit, but it turned. When the minute hand jumped, a train was already pulling out below me, and I stood there a long time, watching it go.