Realism style black and grey skull tattoo with a red rose and handwritten script on a lower leg, with a clock face above.

Skull, clock and rose on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A photorealistic human skull dominates the tattoo, with a clock mechanism, hands and Roman numerals above it and a red rose partly behind the jaw. The skull and clock are rendered in black and grey with soft gradients and fine detail, while the rose is the only colour. Handwritten script runs down the lower part of the limb, and the photograph is taken against a dark background with the skin lit from the left.

Realism Calf Skull Clock Roman numeral Rose Script Key

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hettie, the hall clock stopped again on Tuesday, at twenty past four, the same minute Mother's did. I wound it with the brass key she kept in the drawer and it ran for an hour before it gave up, so I've taken the movement apart on the kitchen table where the light is better.

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Mr Calloway from the workshop came round with his bag of files and said the pivots were worn through, nothing to be done short of a new train. He looked at the red rose in the jug on the windowsill, the last one from the wall by the pear tree, and asked whether we meant to keep it. I said I didn't know. Its petals had gone brown at the edges, and the old skull paperweight beside it had a crack along the jaw I hadn't noticed before, as if something had been gnawing at the bone.

I found a note folded small inside the case, in Father's hand. It was only a list of Roman numerals with a date beside each one, and under the last, XII, a line that said wind it before the frost. We have had no frost yet. The apples are still on the trees and the wasps are drunk on the windfalls, so I have decided the frost can wait.

I'm sending the key with this. Keep it on your ribbon, and if the hands ever stop at an hour you can't account for, you'll know whose hour it was. Come home for the picking, the ladders are still in the shed. Your loving sister, Nell