Pencil and ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a Roman numeral clock with an orchid, rose, butterfly and beaded chains, in black and grey, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Clock, butterfly and orchid design drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey pencil drawing of a tattoo design on white paper, with two pencils resting at the top edge. The central motif is a clock face with Roman numerals and a faceted diamond, framed by a butterfly, orchid and rose, with a small pocket watch above and strings of beads hanging below. The shading is fine and detailed, with soft greys on the petals and crisp linework on the numerals and beads.

Botanical Realism Clock Roman numeral Butterfly Orchid Rose Bead Diamond Pocket watch Arrow Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter had sold her father's last watch to buy her way into Ferrol's Fair, and the fair did not give change. It came to the edge of the town every autumn and stayed until it had taken what it was owed. She walked its length at dusk with a cloth bag of glass beads and a diamond wrapped in a handkerchief, looking for the booth with a painted clock above its door.

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The showman, Tobias Crane, sat inside beneath a clock with no hands. "Time is what we sell here," he said, and tipped the bag onto the counter. He counted the beads one by one, rolling each between his fingers. "Forty-one minutes. Not enough for the wheel." She said she did not want the wheel. She wanted her father's hour back, the one he had lost on the stair the night the fever came. She laid the diamond beside the beads, and its facets threw light across the ceiling like the inside of a kaleidoscope.

Crane was quiet a long while. Then he cut a single thread from the hem of his coat, strung the beads on it, knotted it twice, and handed it back. "Every bead is a minute you will not get back," he said. "Wear them and you will be the one who counts." She tucked the string into her collar and walked home through the dark, feeling each bead cold against her throat like a small clock running down.

At the stair her father was waiting, sitting up, his eyes clear. He asked where she had been and she told him. When she reached into her coat to show him the diamond, the handkerchief held only a folded pocket watch stopped at nine. She sat beside him on the bottom step and listened to the house tick, and for once she did not count it.