Butterfly and pocket watch with script banner
Realism · Black and grey · Flash
A shaded drawing of a tattoo design showing a butterfly perched above an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and a chain. A ribbon banner curls across the lower half of the watch and carries the script words Memories last forever. The pencil-style shading is soft and realistic, with the watch face, wings and ribbon all rendered in black and grey tones on a plain white background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The customs man at Hollin Bridge wanted to know what the old woman was carrying in her handkerchief, and she told him it was time. He laughed, then turned the pocket watch over in his palm and felt it ticking against the cold. Its hands had stopped years earlier in another country, but the brass still held a warmth that made him think of his mother's kitchen.
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She had walked down from the river villages with the watch wrapped in linen. Her husband had mended clocks for the whole valley, and on the last morning he had promised her that a thing made true by hand would outlast any bother with borders. The paper he had written on lay folded inside the case: Memories last forever. She had never trusted paper. Stone was better, or a good escapement.
The officer asked what she meant to declare. She opened her hand, and a pale butterfly lifted off the chain and settled on the back of his wrist. He held very still. Neither of them spoke until it flew away over the wire and into the fog above the water.
He waved her through without a stamp. Afterwards, people in the valley said that whenever she was asked the hour, she held up the watch and said the one thing it had never lost, which was the moment she had left home.
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