Love nonsense

One life, one change

Onelifeone

Late April 2025 I spent a few days in Greece, visiting my family. I made long walks through the old town of Thessaloniki together with my father and with an uncle. I also made long walks through the mountains around Eleftheroupoli, I ate a lot, and I took pictures of clocks to fill the Pix Clock with even more pictures of clocks.

A work of art made from pieces of paper. It’s a scene of people with musical instruments, in an open tent-like structure, with a red bird on top. It also has a large white clock in it. The clock points at one o’clock. A detail of a colourful, pretty busy painting. It seems like a simplified map of Moscow. There are all kinds of buildings on this painting. On two of these buildings there’s a clock. One of them points at 23 minutes past one. The other points at 5 past 3 BIN A detail of a record by Manos Chadzidakis with a drawn building with a clock on it that points at approximately 2 minutes to three. A detail of a piece of embroidery. There are two angels, two birds, and many flowers on it, surrounding a clock that points at three o’clock On a wall in a garden, surrounded by plants, is a large clock made from flowering pots. This clock points at 26 minutes past 3 A detail of an embroidery. There’s an embroidered clock on it which points at nine o’clock.

Some of these clocks are unique. Like the embroidered clocks an aunt of mine and an uncle of mine made. Or the works of art with clocks that I saw in the MOMUS museum. Or that clock made from pots in the old town of Thessaloniki, or the one on a record by Manos Chatzidakis. These clocks really diversify the collection.

The tattoo

My aunt took me out for an enormous lunch in the fabulous Taverna Kastaniés, high up on the Pangaio mountain. It was the first of May, which is a public holiday in Greece. It was very, very busy in the taverna. Families eating and drinking, and waiters running around with huge trays, filled with plates of food. One of these waiters was this Herculean body builder with a large tattoo of a clock on his underarm. When he brought us the bill, I dared to ask him if I could take a picture of this tattoo. He was honoured.

A large tattoo on someone’s underarm. It has playing cards, a rose, a clock, and the words One Life, One Change on it. The clock has no hands, so it doesn’t tell us what time it is.

It’s a classic macho tattoo, with a rose, with playing cards, and with banners. And with some small, but interesting issues. First of all, on the banners it says One life, One change. What does this mean? Does it mean that one life brings one change to the world? Or would it perhaps be more personal, about the changes in our own lives? That our one life is just one single, long, continuous change. That’s one way to look at change. Personally I think I’ve had many changes so far in my life, so my macho tattoo would read One life, many changes. Could it be that it’s just one wrong letter? Maybe he means One life, one chance. In that case it’s a classic, and wonderfully weird Greek spelling mistake, similar to the jeweller who advertised Cold Silver in bright neon.

The other issue is that the clock doesn’t have hands! I really wanted to add this picture to the Pix Clock, but it doesn’t show the time! It does have cogs, you can see them, they tattooed them, so it has a mechanism to change the time. But they obviously couldn’t decide on which time to show. Maybe when the one big change happens in his life he’ll add the time? Who knows? Maybe when his first child is born? Maybe that’s what he means by One life, One change?

Anyway, I don’t want to wait until his child is born, I want to know what time it is right now. Since the clock is remarkably precise, it is a well set tattoo with almost perfect angles, I was able to add the hands programmatically. So here it is, a fully functional one life, one change tattoo clock.