Black and grey realism tattoo of a spiral clock face with musical notes and a dragonfly on a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spiral clock and music notes on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A spiral clock face with Roman-style numerals sits at the centre of the design, with its hands and dial blending into a swirling vortex. Musical notes, a treble clef and a dragonfly with shaded wings rise from the clock and trail down beside it. The tattoo is rendered in soft black and grey shading with smooth gradients, set against a model's upper back and shoulders.

Realism Back Clock Music note Treble clef Dragonfly Spiral Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell kept the Gull Rest boarding house at Marrowstone, and the clock in the hall had stopped at ten past four the winter her husband went out with the lifeboat. She wound it every Sunday anyway, because a house with a dead clock is a house where nobody is expected back.

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The lodger that spring was a piano tuner from Leeds, a thin man with a dragonfly pinned to his hatband, who came to bring the parlour piano back to life. It had not been played since the war. While he worked, the notes climbed the stairs like something looking for a door. He asked whether the clock in the hall ran fast. Ada said it ran slow, and always had, and that was why she never trusted it.

On the seventh night he sat with her in the hall and turned the clock's key one click the wrong way. The hands began to coil, round and round, the numerals spiralling inward until the whole hour was a whirl the size of a thumbprint. Ada heard a note from the piano, then another, then the entire tune her husband used to hum while mending nets. She understood the tuner had been listening for it all along.

By morning he was gone, leaving his bill under the teapot and a single dragonfly feather on the hall table. Ada wound the clock forward to the proper hour, slowly, one click at a time, and it ticked on as if nothing had happened. Still, on Sundays, she hears the piano picking out the net-mending tune when the house is empty, and she has stopped minding.