Neo-traditional colour tattoo on the ribs showing an anatomical heart dripping above a pocket watch, two red roses, green leaves and grey pearl chains.

Anatomical heart, pocket watch and roses on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo on the side of the torso features an anatomical heart with dripping detail, set above a gold pocket watch with Roman numerals. Two red roses, green leaves and a looping chain of grey pearls frame the heart and fill the composition. Bold black outlines, smooth red and maroon shading and soft grey background wash give the piece a glossy, dimensional finish.

Neo-trad Ribs Anatomical heart Heart Pocket watch Clock Rose Pearl Leaves Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Amos Redfern kept the clock in the window of his shop on Chapel Street, and every Thursday the town's children came to see whether it had stopped. In the spring of 1953 it stopped the same week Mrs Pym's roses died in the rain, and nobody could say why a clock should care about a garden.

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His granddaughter Nell came to live with him that summer, carrying a string of grey glass beads her mother had left behind. She threaded them through his watch chain while he slept, one bead for every hour he had lost to the bench, and by August the chain hung in loops to the floor. Amos found it and said nothing. He only unhooked the last bead and put it in his waistcoat pocket.

When the flood came in September, the river took the Pym cottage and the rose beds with it. Amos went down with a lantern and the watch open in his palm. The face had gone dark with water, and a thin red line ran from the winding stem as though something inside were bleeding. He held it up to the light, and it ticked once, then twice, then steadily, like a heart that had found its way back.

Nell found him at the river wall at dawn, still holding it. "The clock was never broken," he said. "It was only waiting for someone to hold it still long enough." She took the beads from his pocket and counted them, and the number came out even.