Realism tattoo of a shaded skull merged with a clock mechanism and Roman numerals across the back of a hand, with a coloured forearm sleeve above the wrist.

Skull and clock on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a realistic skull tattooed across the back of a hand, with gears and a clock face with Roman numerals worked into the skull's eye socket and side. The skull is rendered in fine black and grey shading with soft highlights and deep shadows, and the hand rests on a dark leather surface. A coloured sleeve is partly visible above the wrist.

Realism Hand Forearm Skull Clock Gear Roman numeral Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last clock in Harrowmere had stopped at ten past three the night the north tower fell, and nobody in the village would touch it. Ada Quill climbed the hill with a leather roll of tools and a tin of clock oil, because her father had been the valley's only clockmaker and she had inherited his debts along with his bench. Ivy grew through the arrow slits now. The great hall was roofless, and in a chapel niche a dial with Roman numerals sat in the stone like a moon.

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Behind the face the mechanism was furred with cobweb and something smaller that had lived there a long time. She brushed it away and found the escapement jammed by a brass tooth bent as though something had gripped it. Beneath the dial, in a hollow the masons had cut for a reliquary, lay a skull. Its eye sockets held two wheels of gears that turned when she breathed on them. Her father's letters had never mentioned a skull.

She worked until the light went amber, easing the tooth straight, polishing pivots, counting teeth under her loupe. Each one she set seemed to lift a weight from the hollow. When the pendulum finally swung, its tick was thin and clean, and the skull's jaw dropped a fraction, as if relieved. The hands moved on from ten past three to the next minute.

Ada packed her roll and left the oil tin on the sill. Down in the village the church bell began, a few seconds behind the castle clock, and for the first time since the tower fell the two agreed. She walked down without looking back, but somewhere on the path she caught herself counting in the same slow beat, one tick, one step, as if the hill had been keeping time with her all along.