Black and grey realistic tattoo of a skull merged with a Roman numeral clock face and gears, across the side of a torso on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and clock mechanism on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic skull sits at the centre of the design, with a Roman numeral clock face above it and exposed gears and cogs around its lower half. The shading is smooth and fine, with strong highlights on the bone and deep shadows in the clock mechanism. The design wraps across the side of the torso, with the skull placed centrally and the clock face and gears filling the surrounding space.

Realism Ribs Skull Clock Gear Roman numeral Cog Mechanical Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been watching the wall clock on Ward 7 since ten past two, and by four it has stopped looking like a clock and started looking like a face. The minute hand drags. Somewhere below the nurses' station a trolley rattles over the lino, and a pump on bed nine starts its thin complaint, the double beep that means somebody has forgotten to check a line.

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Sister Okonedo says the clock was donated by a funeral director in 1974, which you doubt, because the numerals are Roman and nobody on a ward picks Roman numerals unless they want to look serious. The brass has gone the colour of weak tea. Behind the glass cover the gears turn in a slow argument with one another. You have started to think of them as the real staff: they never take a break, never need a bleep for a second opinion, never go home.

At half four Mr Halloran in bay C asks you the time. You tell him, and he says that's wrong, it has always been a quarter to, and you check your watch and he is right. The clock is slow. You climb onto a plastic chair and nudge the hands forward while the old mechanism grinds and sighs. Mr Halloran watches you do it from his pillow with the satisfaction of a man who has won a small bet. You realise the wrong time was what he wanted from you: someone to disagree with at four in the morning.

By six the window has gone from black to dishwater grey. You sign the handover book and write the time in the box, and the clock above the desk ticks on, exact for once, its gears turning with no sign of tiredness at all.