Realistic black and grey tattoo of a skull fused with a Roman numeral clock face and gears, on the side of the torso.

Skull and clock mechanism tattoo on the side

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits in the centre of the design, overlapped by a large clock face with Roman numerals, hour and minute hands, and an exposed movement. Cogs and gears fill the lower and right sides, and the skin edges are shaded to suggest torn or peeling flesh. The work is rendered in smooth grey shading with fine linework and strong contrast, and the composition wraps across the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Skull Clock Gear Cog Roman numeral Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had the church clock's movement open on the bench when the vicar came in to ask whether the hands would be right by half eleven. "They'll be right when I say they're right," she said, without looking up from the escapement, and he retreated towards the door the way men do when a woman in a workshop has been short with them.

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The skull on the shelf above her belonged to old Mr Pargeter, who had kept it on a velvet cushion in the shop window for forty years, beside a pocket watch that never kept time. He had left her the lease, the tools and the skull, along with a note that said only, Mind the seconds. She had moved the skull into the back room after the bride's mother began leaving sugared almonds on its cushion. The mother had taken offence at the grin.

The watch on the bench belonged to the bride's grandfather. It had stopped the week before, and when Ruth eased the back off she found a folded slip of paper tucked under the balance cock, in a hand gone brown with age. Wind me on the day she marries, and not a minute before. Ruth read it twice, then looked at the clock tower through the back window, where the hands stood at a quarter past ten and had stood there, by her reckoning, since Tuesday.

At twenty to eleven she climbed the stair with a winding key in one pocket and the watch in the other. The bells began as she reached the top, and the hour hand crept onto the twelve as the bride came up the path below in a dress the colour of milk. Ruth turned the crown of the little watch until it resisted, then let go, and felt it begin to tick against her hip.