Line drawing of a blue police box with green and cyan circular rings and a hanging pendulum, on a white background, with no body part shown.

TARDIS with rings and pendulum design

Colour · Flash

A drawing of a police box, with the words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX across its top panel, set centrally on a white background. Two large circular rings, one green and one cyan, surround the upper and lower parts of the box, with fine interior linework and small dots. A black pendulum hangs from the base, and soft blue, purple and cyan watercolour-style washes fill the area behind the box.

Police box Tardis Circle Watercolour Ring Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your master has been dead four days, but you still wind the brass rings each dawn, because the box in the back room of the Alexandria workshop does not know he is gone. It stands no taller than your shoulder, cedar boards glazed with the blue of crushed lapis, and across its lid he painted words in a careful Greek hand that nobody in the harbour could read. Dust settles on the green enamel dots of the upper ring. You wipe them with the hem of your tunic every morning, and every morning they gather it again.

Keep reading

The pendulum hangs from the base like a plumb line, a black lead weight on a thread that he swore could count the breaths a ship spent at anchor. At night the lighthouse bell rings late and you hear the weight knock once against the wood, and you start to believe the box is listening. Twice you have sat with your back to it and heard it answer the bell a beat too early.

On the fourth morning a fishmonger's girl knocks at the door asking for the Master. You tell her the box is not for hire, that it does not travel. She shrugs, lifts the lid anyway, and the room fills with the smell of rain that has not yet fallen over the sea. The cyan ring inside begins to turn on its own, slowly, the way a sleeper turns over.

You close the lid gently and wind the weight back to the mark he scratched into the base: a line for every year you have been apprenticed, and one more, freshly cut, that you did not make. Then you let the pendulum swing, and it keeps time with a bell on a harbour that has not been built yet.