Colour and grey tattoo of an anchor wrapped in roses and blue flowers, with a shaded pocket watch below it, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor, pocket watch and flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey anchor runs down the centre of the arm, with a pocket watch showing a clock face on the lower left. Roses, blue and yellow flowers, and green leaves and stems wind around the anchor and the watch. The linework is fine and the grey shading is soft, while the flowers are filled with colour, and the image is shown straight on with even lighting.

Botanical Forearm Anchor Pocket watch Clock Rose Flower Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning before the first bell I carried the bucket up from the hold and set it on the forward rail, where the spray could reach the leaves. The roses were a stubborn red thing my mother had sent in a seed tin, and they had sulked through three ports before deciding to live. Beside them, on a nail I had hammered into the bulkhead, hung Grandad's pocket watch, which had stopped at twenty to seven the morning he died and never started again.

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Bosun Haddow said a stopped watch was bad luck on any ship and had no business being looked at, let alone wound. I told him I wasn't winding it to tell the time. I turned the crown anyway, a little at a time, just to hear the small clicks of it being fussed over. The anchor was the one thing on the Halcyon Dawn that everybody agreed about. It went down for every harbour and came up for every sea, and when it broke free of the Azores mud that week, trailing weed like a wet wig, the whole watch cheered.

Somewhere past the Cape the first blue flowers opened, and I stopped minding the sulking roses. We raised the Lizard on a grey Tuesday with the wind dropping. I carried the bucket down the gangway with one hand and kept the watch in my coat pocket with the other.

I walked up the hill to the churchyard above Falmouth harbour, where the grass was still wet, and I set the roses at the foot of his stone. Then I took out the watch, held it to my ear, and found it had finally started again, ticking quietly against my ribs the whole way up.