Realism style black and grey tattoo across a woman's upper back showing a spiralling clock face with music notes, a treble clef and a guitar.

Spiral clock and music notes on a upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a spiralling clock face with Roman and Arabic style numerals, with a treble clef, musical notes and a guitar outline rising up towards the nape of the neck. Shading is soft and smoky, with strong black linework on the clock rim and numerals and grey wash across the background and ribbon-like swirls. The ink is almost entirely black and grey against the skin, and the tattoo is centred on the upper back with the subject photographed from behind.

Realism Back Clock Music note Treble clef Guitar Spiral Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the runner beans, because this one is about a spring, and a spring is mostly about patience. Old Albert Fenn kept the church clock at Lower Wraxby, and he had built its face in a coil, the numerals wound round the rim like the inside of a snail shell, so that time seemed to go down into the middle rather than round. Every Saturday a girl called Maud Pellow sat on the churchyard wall with a battered guitar and played tunes she had made up, and every Saturday Albert told her the clock was not listening to her, lass, it had its own business to attend to.

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But Maud had a tune she could not finish, and one wet evening she came to his shed with the notes scratched on the back of a seed packet and asked if a clock could be made to sing it. Albert laughed at her, then went quiet, then took a brass cylinder down from the shelf and began punching pins into it by lamplight, one for each note, the treble clef drawn beside them like a hook to hang it on. The spring snapped at three in the morning. He swore, mended it with a bootlace and a sliver of his own pocket watch, and was still at the bench when the sun came up grey over the lych gate.

That noon the whole village stood in the churchyard. When the hour struck, the rim of the clock began to ring out Maud's tune, slowly, each bell-note falling inward as the hands crept towards the centre of the coil. Nobody could say afterwards whether it finished or simply went quiet at the heart of the spiral. Maud swore it had played her tune in reverse, back to the first note she ever wrote. And that is why, if you stand under the Wraxby clock at noon, you will catch a few bars of someone's guitar drifting down from the tower, and you will want to stay and hear the end of it, even though your tea is going cold.