Pencil drawing of a vertical clockwork design with two clock faces, meshing gears and ornate filigree scrollwork, shown in black and grey.

Clockwork design with gears and pocket watches

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design built around two clock faces, one large and one smaller, with meshing cogs and a dangling chain beneath. Ornate filigree scrollwork forms the spine above and below the timepieces, with hatched shading on the gears and dial edges. The pencil drawing is in greys on a pale background and is centred on the page.

Clock Pocket watch Gear Cog Filigree Scrollwork Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the watch in the long grass under the Bramley tree on the last Saturday of August, its chain tangled in windfall apples while wasps work at the split skin. The large face has stopped at twenty past four. The smaller one beside it, which you had taken for decoration, is still ticking on its own time, as if it has been waiting for someone to notice.

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Your grandmother Ada kept the orchard at Hollin Ford for fifty years and never once wound a clock in it. She said the trees kept their own hours, and fruit dropped when it was ready, not when the church bell said so. Her husband Walter had the pair made by a man in Leeds who filed every cog by hand, and he hung the spare chain from the gatepost so pickers could read the time between rows.

You carry the watches up to the cottage and lay them on the kitchen table beside a jar of plum jam. With a jeweller's loupe and the fine tweezers you ease the smaller movement open. A single hair of spring has come loose and caught on the great wheel, and that is all that has been holding the orchard still. You straighten it, close the case, and set both hands to the hour when the grass was wet.

Outside the sun slides behind the ridge. When you wind the big watch its second hand jerks forward, and in the yard the first pears of the season begin to fall, one for every tick, until the chain beneath the dial stops swaying and hangs straight.