Pencil drawing of an anchor with rope wrapped around the shank, a pocket watch hanging from its ring and cursive script beneath, on paper.

Anchor and pocket watch design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pencil or ink sketch on paper shows an anchor with rope coiled around its shank, with a pocket watch hanging from the ring by a chain. Cursive script reading I will wait sits beside the anchor's lower arm. The linework is shaded in black and grey, with the watch face and clock hands drawn in detail and the anchor finished with soft hatching.

Anchor Rope Pocket watch Clock Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis wound the pocket watch on the harbour wall every evening at six, because her father had told her that a watch left alone for a season forgets what time it is. The chain was cold through her gloves. Below her the Maud Ellen knocked against the bollards, her hull the colour of wet slate, and no one aboard had called out in three weeks.

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The watch had been Tom's. He left it on the kitchen table the morning the trawlers were called up, with a note tucked under the chain that said only, keep it going for me. She took it to Harrow's on the High Street to have the crystal replaced, and old Harrow, who had mended every clock in Saltmarsh since the war, held it to the lamp and said it kept better time than St Peter's. She asked him to set the hands to the minute the ropes came off the quay, and he did not ask why.

In March a telegram came to the dockmaster's office. The Maud Ellen had put into Lerwick with her anchor fouled and two men short, and Tom's name was not on either list. Mrs Hollis walked down to the slipway with the watch in her coat and found the anchor the crew had hauled up, its rope still coiled around the shank. Someone had been turning that rope over and over all winter, the way she had been turning the stem of the watch.

She hung the watch from the ring of the old anchor, let the chain swing free, and took the chalk from the board by the slipway. She wrote the three words Tom always said to her before the tide turned. Then she went home and wound the clock on the mantel, because somebody in the house had to keep time.