Black and grey realism tattoo of roses and a pocket watch with small script on the outer thigh.

Black and grey roses and pocket watch on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the outer thigh showing two large roses, one in front and one partly behind, with a pocket watch between them. The roses and watch are shaded in soft greys with smooth gradients and darker accents in the petal folds. A small piece of cursive script sits at the top right, partly cut off by the edge of a dark skirt.

Realism Botanical Thigh Rose Pocket watch Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The winder had seized again, so Maud carried the watch up the tower stairs in her apron pocket, where it knocked against her hip with every step. Forty-one steps. She counted them the way her father had taught her, under her breath, the way other girls said prayers. At the top the wind came through the broken arrow slits and lifted the grey hair from her neck, and she set the watch on the sill where the stone had worn smooth as soap.

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Below her the roses had gone wild in the old kitchen garden. Nobody had pruned them since the Ashdown family left the castle to the damp and the jackdaws, and now they climbed the walls in great pale heads, some open, some already browning at the edges like paper held too near a fire. Her father had been able to mend anything with a balance spring and a pair of tweezers. He had mended this watch the week before the men came up the valley road, and he had not lived to see the spring of the year after.

The hands had stopped at twenty to four. She turned the case over and found the inscription he had scratched inside the lid, a name and a date, and beneath it a smaller mark, a rose with five petals, which she had always thought was meant for her mother. Maud wound the crown slowly. The movement shivered, caught, and began to tick against the stone.

Far off, the village bell began to ring for vespers, the first time it had rung in four years. A petal came loose from the nearest bloom, drifted through the arrow slit and settled on the watch face, right over the hour hand. She did not brush it away. She let it sit there while the time ran on, counted the strokes of the bell against the ticking, and for once they agreed.