Pencil sketch of a traditional-style anchor wrapped in rope with a pocket watch showing Roman numerals, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and pocket watch design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an anchor with a rope wrapped around it and a pocket watch set in its centre, with Roman numerals on the watch face and a crown and ring at the top. The linework is loose and sketchy, with dark pencil shading on the anchor arms and fine hatching on the rope and watch case. The image is in greyscale and centred on a sheet of paper with a mechanical pencil resting across the top left corner.

Traditional Anchor Pocket watch Clock Rope Roman numeral Laurel Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the watch open on the bench before the kettle boiled, the back plate lifted and its tiny wheels laid out on a square of chamois like a row of teeth. Jonah had carried it up from the slipway in a tobacco tin, wrapped in oilskin, and said only that the tide had turned it over on the Ness steps.

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"It's Hal's, then," she said.

"Name's scratched inside the lid." He turned his cap round in his hands. "Harbourmaster wants it back to his mother before the regatta."

Mags didn't need the lid to know it. Every family in Port Tarran knew the anchor on the case, the rope wound round its shank, the laurel sprig curling beneath the dial, and the Roman numerals Hal had insisted on because his grandfather had used them. He had kept the watch running ten minutes fast so the boats would be home before any squall. Everyone teased him for it. Nobody had been caught out in the autumn he carried it.

The mainspring was snapped clean. She sat with the loupe in her eye for an hour, lifting the fragments free with tweezers, and when she finally slid the dial off there was a folded strip of paper pressed flat against the movement. It was a tide table in pencil, columns of times in his square hand, and beside the last Saturday a single line: Mags, the tides, don't wait up. She had never once told him to stop being late.

She fitted a new spring from the box of spares, set the hands to the true time, and wound the crown until the second hand began its slow walk round the dial. Jonah took the tin without asking what she had decided. Some things were kinder left running a little ahead, and she had learned that from a man who was never once on time.