Black and grey traditional sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing skulls, roses, a clock, a microphone and banners with lettering.

Skull, rose and banner sleeve on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three views of a full sleeve covering the upper arm and forearm, with skulls, roses, a clock face, an hourglass and a vintage microphone. Lettering runs across ribbon banners and the design is finished with stars at the lower end. The work is in black and grey with solid outlines, soft shading and bold contrast, and the three angles are shown side by side.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Skull Rose Clock Hourglass Microphone Banner Lettering Star

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody on Tallow Lane could say when Absalom Pike's shop had last opened in daylight. The lamp in his window burned from dusk until the bells of St Jude gave up at four, and the clocks inside all ran a little wrong, so people who left with a watch came back to ask why it had lost an hour.

Keep reading

Nell Harrow sang at the back of the Lantern Club for coins and a gin she didn't always drink. One wet night in February she climbed the three steps to his door, because she had been told he could stop a clock or start one. Pike sat behind a counter crowded with hourglasses, a skull wearing a pocket watch, and a roll of sheet music gone yellow at the edges. "Your minutes are running out fast," he said, without looking up. "I can give you a voice that never tires. You give me every minute you spend, and I keep the count."

She asked what the catch was. He said there was none, only the ledger. She agreed on one condition: he must let her keep the songs. For eleven years she sang into a microphone that hummed like a hive, and the crowds came back every week. Her hair went grey under the stage lights. Each night she sang the line she had written on the back of a beer mat, the one about holding on to it, and each night a minute slipped out of her and into his book.

On the night she was called to his door for the last time, he was not behind the counter. There was only the hourglass, its top bulb empty and its bottom full. Beside it lay the ledger, open at a page where every minute was crossed through in a careful hand except one. At the bottom he had written, in pencil, keep the rest. Nell went out into Tallow Lane and sang all the way home.