Realistic black and grey upper arm sleeve showing two skulls, a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a red rose.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skulls, pocket watch and rose on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two skulls, one a plain skeleton and one a sugar skull with swirling detail and a red rose, sit beside a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a strand of beads. The shading is smooth and detailed, with fine linework in the watch mechanism and the bones of the hand. Black and grey tones dominate, and the red rose is the only strong colour against a white shirt.

Realism Upper arm Skull Sugar skull Pocket watch Clock Rose Bead Skeleton hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the booth had run five minutes slow since the flood, and I had never bothered to fix it, so when the couple came up the lane just before three, I trusted the clock over my own watch and let them stand in the lamplight a while. The man went first. He was all angles under his coat, and he carried a pocket watch on a loop of black beads, opening and shutting its lid as though it might tell him something new. The woman walked half a step behind him with a red rose pinned above one ear. Her face was painted white and scrolled in grey, like the lace on a funeral card.

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"Papers," I said, which is what I always say, and she slid them under the glass without a word. Her passport was stamped with a river crossing I did not recognise and a date from before the bridge went down. The man leaned in and tapped the watch against the counter. "It stopped at the hour we were due," he said, and his voice came out dry as chalk. I told him the watch had been running fine by my reckoning. He smiled with his whole jaw, and I wished I had not looked.

I stamped the pages. Before I could hand them back, the woman touched the rose and said her mother had worked this booth before me, and that the clock was hers, and that it had stopped the night the water came up. I did not believe her. Then the lamp above us flickered, the hands on the clock jumped forward five minutes in one movement, and when I looked back down the lane there was nobody on it at all, only a single red petal on the wet step, bright as a coin.