Black and grey realistic design of a cracked skull with a rose at its right side, set against a clock face with Roman numerals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and rose within a clock face

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded drawing of a cracked human skull with a full-blown rose tucked against its upper right side. A partial clock face with bold Roman numerals curves behind the skull and rose. The work uses fine greyscale shading for bone, petals and the dark clock rim, with the white numerals standing out against the darker band.

Realism Skull Rose Clock Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The clock in the stairwell at Kestrel House has stopped again, the big one with the black rim and the white Roman numerals that Mr Adeyemi bolted above the landing the year the lifts first failed, so nobody on the fourteenth floor would miss the bin lorry. It stopped at twenty to four. I know because I was standing under it with a carrier bag of your mother's sugar when the power dipped, and the hands gave a shudder and sat still, like a dog that has heard its name.

I went up with a torch on Tuesday to look. The glass has a crack running through the X, and someone has been leaving things on the window ledge beneath it: a tin of pilchards, a plastic knight missing his sword, and last week a red rose, still wet, wrapped in the Evening Standard. Nobody on the block admits to it. Mrs Pryce on eleven says it is the lad from flat 302 who used to whistle on the stairs before he moved to Dagenham. Mr Mensah says it is a bored teenager with a taste for drama.

I asked the caretaker to open the case. Inside, the works were dusty but sound, the little brass wheels turning when he nudged them. The minute hand had worked loose and was lying against the glass like a fallen oar. He fixed it with a dab of superglue and said the rest was up to the damp.

I didn't tell him about the rose. I wound the clock myself on Sunday, and by Monday the hands had caught up with the morning, and the rose had gone from the ledge. In its place sat a carrier bag of sugar that wasn't mine. Come home at Easter. Bring the good scissors.

Love, Nessa