Shirtless torso of a man with colour traditional-style sleeve tattoos on both arms, including a woman's head with flowers on the upper arm and a pocket watch, and black lyric text on the ribs.

Colour sleeves and lyric text on ribs

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows a shirtless man from the chest down, with his face cropped out of frame. Both arms carry full sleeve tattoos in coloured ink, including a woman's head with flowers and a pocket watch on the upper arm, and a dark-toned design on the forearm. Black serif lettering runs across the side of the ribs in several lines of lyrics, and the subject stands in a tiled bathroom under even indoor light.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Forearm Ribs Woman Flower Pocket watch Lyric Text Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shift whistle at Hollin Pit went at ten to six, and my father's watch never once agreed with it. He kept it on a chain in his waistcoat, a silver pocket watch with a dent in the lid from the day the cage dropped six feet onto the landing. He said the dent kept it honest. Every morning he wound it in the scullery, held it to his ear like a doctor, and told my mother it was a minute slow.

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Mam had a painting on the back of the scullery door, a woman copied from a sailor's postcard by a lad who later went to Leeds and never came back. She had roses pinned in her hair and a look that said she knew the price of coal to the penny. We called her Dolly. Dad said the watch and Dolly were the only two things in the house that never lied to him, which was a strange thing to say about a painting and a clock, but he meant it.

The winter of the strike, the watch stopped. Nobody went down, so there was no reason for it to keep time. I found him in the yard with it open on his knee, the hands at twenty past four and the dent catching the light. He didn't wind it. He said there was no point telling time to a town that had stopped needing it.

I took it from him in March, when the frost finally gave up, and carried it into the scullery. Mam had a tin of oil and a rag. I wound it until the spring bit, held it to my ear, and heard it catch. We never got the minute right again, but I set it by a whistle nobody sounded any more, and Dolly watched from the door as if she'd been waiting for us to remember.