Colourful watercolour style tattoo of a bird in flight above a gold pocket watch on a person's upper back.

Bird and pocket watch with watercolour splashes

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black bird with a pink and purple wing tip flies upward above a gold pocket watch with a beaded chain. The bird and watch are outlined and shaded with soft tonal gradients, while loose teal, purple and pink washes and speckled splatters spread behind them. The composition is diagonal and fills the upper back, with the watch face showing Roman numerals in blue and pink tones.

Back Bird Pocket watch Clock Chain Watercolour splashes Wing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the watch in the lift shaft of Harrow Point on a Tuesday, wedged against the rails where the lift has been dead since March. Its beaded chain has come loose and hangs down the concrete like a rosary. Nobody on the fourteenth floor has noticed that it stopped at twenty to four, or that the minute hand keeps trembling as if it wants to be somewhere else.

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Mrs Dacre from flat 9 says it belonged to her father, a railway signalman who never let a clock run down in his life. You take it to the landing window, where the paint has blistered off the sill and the car park below looks like wet slate. You wind the crown with your thumbnail. The second hand jerks forward, and the pigeons lift off the bins all at once, as though someone has shouted their name.

Something dark drops from the roof gutter and climbs the air above the bin store. It has a wingtip the colour of a bruise going pink at the edges, and it turns its head toward you as if it knows exactly what you have been carrying up and down those stairs for a year. The chain goes taut in your fingers. You open the case, and the hands spin backwards in a blur of blue and rose.

The bird is gone when you look up. You stay on the landing until the light changes, then you hang the watch by its chain on the balcony rail, where it swings and ticks against the wind, keeping the time the lift forgot.