Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull over two clock faces with Roman numerals, shown on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and clock faces on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic skull sits at the centre of the design, with its eye sockets and cheekbones shaded to show depth, and two clock faces with Roman numerals and hands overlap behind and below it. The work uses smooth grey shading and sharp black accents for contrast, with highlights on the bone. The tattoo fills the frame against a blurred dark indoor background, with a partial dark tattoo visible at the top left.

Realism Forearm Skull Clock Pocket watch Roman numeral Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, because the lamp at Gallow Nab has been dark since the winter, and I'll not tell this with the wick cold. Old Tobias Quarrie kept that light for thirty-one years, and he kept the clock too, the great brass movement behind the lens that had to be wound every six hours or the beam drifted off the bay and put the Scarrow boats on the rocks.

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He had a skull on the sill beside the logbook, a gull-picked thing the spring tides had dragged up from the shingle. He said it was the only honest tenant the tower ever had, because it never once asked him the time. Beside it he kept his dead father's pocket watch, and the two of them sat there ticking at each other, four minutes apart, because Tobias would not set the watch to the tower clock and would not set the tower clock to the watch. Folk on the mainland thought him mad for it. He said the difference was the only company he had.

The night the gale came in from the north-east, the movement seized at a quarter past eleven. He had to wind it by hand with the beam dying, counting the turns against his father's watch, sweating in his oilskin with the wind trying to pull the door off its hinges. He knew the hour by that watch and not by the great dial, so he trusted the four minutes, and he trusted the skull grinning at him in the candlelight. The beam came round just in time to show a lugger lying off the point, lamp lit, pulling for home.

In the morning the skipper came up the path with a bottle of rum and asked him what time the light had turned. Tobias told him, and then told him the true hour, which was four minutes later, because that was how he'd always known it. The skipper laughed and said his own watch was a quarter-hour slow. Tobias just nodded at the skull on the sill, and that, I'm told, was the whole of his explanation for the rest of his life.