Black and grey realism tattoo on an upper arm showing a sugar skull woman portrait above a pocket watch and a skull.

Sugar skull portrait and pocket watch on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey realism tattoo covers the upper arm, with a woman in sugar skull make-up shown in profile at the top. Below her, a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a cracked dial sits beside a shaded skull, with a partial second skull at the bottom edge. The shading is smooth and detailed, with strong highlights on the face and the watch, and the arm is photographed close up against a blurred indoor background.

Realism Upper arm Sugar skull Woman Portrait Skull Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire only warms the people nearest it. No, you with the cough. Now. The pass above Veyra has a watchmaker's shop in it, though nobody has lived there since the snow took the road. My grandmother's brother rang the bell at the top, and he told me this the winter I was your age, so trust it as you like.

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A woman came up from the valley the night before the Feast of the Dead, her face painted white and scrolled in black like a lace collar. She asked the watchmaker, Tomas Orrin, to mend a pocket watch that had stopped at a quarter past eleven. He looked at the dial, cracked from the twelve down through the numerals like a frozen stream, and said he could mend the glass but not the hour. She laughed. The hour, she said, was the only thing she had brought with her.

So he set to work by the stove while she drank his brandy and watched the candle. Each time the hands moved a notch the cold crept further into the room, and by midnight the window had frosted over from the inside. "Whose hour is it?" he asked. She said it belonged to whoever held the watch when the bell rang. Then she lifted a skull lantern from her lap, set it on the bench, and the bell at the pass began to toll for a death that had not happened yet.

Tomas closed the case and handed it back. That is all the story has. In the spring they found his coat folded on the step, and the watch in its pocket was wound and ticking, with a fine new crack across the glass that he had never once in his life let go unmended.