Watercolour design drawing of a bird in flight beside a pocket watch strung with beads, with purple and pink paint drips and splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird and pocket watch watercolour design

Colour · Flash

A bird with outstretched wings flies across a pocket watch with a Roman numeral face, a ring of dark beads and a small ornate bow at the top. The linework is loose and the bird is shaded in teal, grey and purple washes, while the watch rim is pink and gold. Purple and pink paint runs and splatters fall below the watch and across the pale background.

Bird Pocket watch Clock face Bead Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's down to its bones and this story is older than the fire. In the kingdom of Harrowmere, past the salt flats where the church bells rang backwards, there lived a clockmaker called Ysolde Brisk, and she kept a magpie that did no good at all.

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His name was Tuck. Every dusk he flew up the tower of the market square, perched on the great clock, and stole a single minute from its hands. He carried them off over the marsh in his beak and dropped them in the reeds. Within a season the bread went stale before it was baked, the children grew taller in the mornings and shorter by supper, and the old men in the tavern argued about what day it was and lost every bet.

Ysolde climbed the tower one night with a ladder, a pot of violet ink and her grandfather's pocket watch, its rim painted rose and its chain strung with dark glass beads. Tuck came down to the watch face as though it were a bowl of worms. She held it out to him and said, plainly, 'Take what you like, but you'll pay me back in my own hours.' The bird considered this with one bright eye, then pecked the hands round, and the beads rattled like rain on a tin roof.

What happened next, nobody agreed on, except that Ysolde came down the ladder an old woman with a cane, and the square was full of colour. The stolen minutes had come home, spilling down the tower walls in violet and pink, running off the cobbles into the marsh. If you go to Harrowmere now, you'll see the stains on the stones, purple as a bruise and pink as sunset. Mind your step. The paint's still wet.