Flash design of two overlapping clockwork-style circles in red and black linework, with the quotes 'It was raining when we met' and 'It's the same rain'.

Two clockwork circles with a rain quote

Geometric · Mixed · Flash

The design shows two overlapping circular mechanisms built from interlocking rings, arcs, spokes and small dots, in the manner of a clock or Time Lord-style gear motif. Two lines of text sit beside them, reading 'It was raining when we met' above and 'It's the same rain' below. The linework is bold and symmetrical, with black and dark red strokes on a white background.

Geometric Circle Clockwork Gear Quote Rain Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, you lot at the back, and mind the bunting, it's been raining since Tuesday and the ground won't hold a tent peg. I'll tell you about the twin wheels of Harrow Mill, which I saw turned by a girl called Ada Sallow the summer the big dipper came off its rails at Millbrook.

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Ada was sixteen and kept the works of the mill's great clock, two brass wheels set edge to edge on one shaft, one turning forward and one turning back. Her father built them to tell the hour and the hour before it, he said, so the village could mend its quarrels. Nobody believed him, and nobody much cared until the night a stranger in a navy coat came in out of the downpour and asked the way to the fair.

Here is the trick of it, and I'll say it plain. The stranger stood at the lower wheel and Ada at the upper, and every drop that struck the millrace turned both of them once more. They talked across the spokes until the rain stopped, and when it did she said, "It was raining when we met," and he said, very gently, "It's the same rain," and the clock, which had never once agreed with itself, struck nine and then struck nine again.

Some say he walked off into the fog and never came back. Some say Ada is still up in that loft, oiling the cogs, waiting for the sky to rain on that one evening a second time. I say the rain is still falling somewhere over Harrow, and if you stand under the mill eaves long enough you'll hear two clocks agreeing, and that's the only proof I have, so pay me a penny and move along.