Watercolour-style tattoo of clock faces, gears and a keyhole in pink, blue and purple across the upper back of a person with short blonde hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour clockwork gears on upper back

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A large tattoo of interlocking gears, clock faces with Roman numerals, a keyhole and thin spirals sits centrally on the upper back. Bold black linework is softened by loose, bleeding washes of pink, blue, purple and orange, giving a painterly watercolour effect. The design fills the centre of the frame, with the skin tone and short blonde hair framing it at the top.

Back Gear Clock Clockwork Keyhole Roman numeral Spiral Key Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide clock in the Skerrow harbour office had stopped at twenty past four, and for eleven years the ferrymen had timed their crossings by the gulls instead. I was the only one who still climbed the stair with the oil can, mostly because my uncle Ansel had left me the key on a loop of tarred string and nobody else wanted the job.

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Inside, the works were a mess of brass wheels, some gone sea-green with salt, others flushed pink where the damp had lifted the lacquer. I spent a week with a loupe and a bent pin, following each tooth back to its neighbour. The fault was not in the gears at all. Someone had fitted a second face on the drum, a dial marked in Roman numerals that ran the wrong way round, so every hour the wheels turned against themselves.

On the Saturday the fog came in thick as wool, and I heard the ferry bell out past the reef. I worked the keyhole plate loose with my thumbnail, wound the spring until my forearm burned, and let the escapement go. The tide clock ticked once, twice, and then the hands swung and locked onto the true hour, pale and wet as the paint on a fishing boat.

Afterwards I found my uncle's handwriting pencilled inside the case: Keep it wrong until somebody comes home. I left the second face where it was. The ferry came in on time, and I stood on the quay with the oil can still warm in my hand, listening to the gears argue softly with the sea.