Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull overlaid with a Roman numeral clock face and handwritten script, on the upper arm.

Skull and clock face on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic skull sits across a Roman numeral clock face, with black hands and a bone fragment resting below the jaw. Handwritten script fades into the shaded background around the skull. The tattoo is rendered in soft greyscale shading with fine detail on the bone texture, and the photo is taken close up against a black and white checkered floor.

Realism Upper arm Skull Clock Roman numeral Clock hand Script Bone Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite Tallis had not wound the clock in the harbour office since her father's funeral, and its hands had stopped at twenty to four. On Scarrow the ferry only ran when the tide allowed, so nobody on the quay checked the time against anything but the gulls. The postmistress said a parcel had been rattling inside the case for a fortnight, so Marguerite climbed the ladder with a tin of oil in one pocket and a screwdriver in the other.

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Behind the pendulum, wedged against the brass, she found a bundle of letters tied with fishing line. The ink had bled into the paper like weather spreading over the sound. She knew the hand at once, the g's leaning towards the sea the way her father's always had. The top letter was addressed to her mother and broke off mid-sentence: "If the tide turns before I am home, set the hands by what the sky says and not by what the church says."

She sat on the step with the letters across her knees. The clock on the mainland bank had run five minutes fast for as long as she could remember, and her mother had always laughed at it. Marguerite read the page again, then the next, and found that every one of them ended with a line about the hour, as if he had been counting something she could not see. The grey light through the window had gone thin and yellow at its edges.

She unhooked the pendulum, eased the minute hand round, and set it to the gulls, which had all gone silent on the wall at once. Then she left the case open, so the last of the afternoon fell across the letters and across the numerals, and the clock began to tick again over the empty quay.