Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a black and blue butterfly with a pocket watch, its face marked with Roman numerals, on squared paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and pocket watch design

Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a butterfly with black bold wing bands and ornate filigree patterns, with a pocket watch in front of its lower wings. The watch face has Roman numerals and a blue ornamental centre, and it is ringed by a border of dots and a dotted chain. Blue wash shading gives the clock and wings depth, and a pencil and protractor sit at the edges of the frame.

Butterfly Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Filigree Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had been dead for three days when the butterfly walked out of its works, and Tobias was the only one at the bench to see it. He had the back plate off and a loupe screwed into his eye, and there it was, a dark-banded thing no bigger than a fingernail, snagged in the train wheels like a thought nobody had asked for. He held very still. Mr Pell had told him once that a movement would forgive almost anything except a sudden hand.

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Mr Pell came over with his tea going cold in a chipped mug and peered down over his half-moons. "Lace-winged," he said, as if it were a diagnosis. "Look at the filigree on the hind wings. It's been feeding on the oil and jamming the balance. Get a glass over it before it pulls a pivot." Tobias slid a tumbler across the bench and waited while the creature climbed the glass wall, opening and closing its wings in slow blue applause against the painted Roman numerals.

That night, with the shop shut and the gas lamp hissing, he carried the tumbler to the window and lifted the sash. The butterfly did not leave at once. It sat on the sill under the moon, and the black bands on its wings looked almost like the beaded chain that hung from the watch in its box. Then it lifted and was gone over the rooftops of Clerkenwell.

He cleaned each jewel with a soft brush and put the movement back together by lamplight. The ticket on the case read Mrs Ada Lowe, and she had wanted it going by Thursday because her husband had wound it on the morning they were married. When Tobias set the hands and wound the crown, the mainspring took up its tension with a small, eager sigh. The second hand swept once, twice, then steadied into a beat so even it seemed to be breathing.