Neo-trad style tattoo of a compass rose and pocket watch surrounded by leaves and beads on a thigh, in red, orange, green and pink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass and pocket watch on thighs

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two thighs are shown, each with a large tattoo of a pocket watch with a clock face and beaded chain. The left thigh features a red and black compass rose at the centre of the watch, framed by outlined leaves and pink and orange accents. The linework is bold and dark, with flat colour and some soft shading, and the design fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Compass Compass rose Pocket watch Clock face Leaves Bead Chain

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch lived on the potting shelf between a tin of twine and a jar of bent nails, and nobody was allowed to wind it but Uncle Ted, who said a navigator should always know the hour even when the sky wouldn't tell him. By June the runner beans had climbed their canes faster than anyone could tie them, and the damson leaves were curling at the edges. He had stopped walking up the lane to chapel. He had stopped most things.

Keep reading

On the Tuesday I found him in the greenhouse, sitting on an upturned crate with the watch open on his knee. The glass was cracked across the minute hand. Inside the lid someone had scratched a compass rose with a pin, eight points, one of them aimed straight at the water butt. "Dead reckoning," he said, "you work out where you are from how long you've been going and which way you pointed." He held it out to me. The hands had stopped at twenty to four.

We dug the bed under the old pear that afternoon, the tree he'd planted the year before the war. I did the digging while he gave directions from his crate. North, he kept saying, north by the wall. Two spades down the blade rang on a tin box, rusted shut, with a length of beaded chain coiled inside it like something asleep. He didn't cry. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the path.

I put the watch back on the shelf that night and wound it, and it ran, slow and certain, the way a thing does when it has somewhere to be. In the morning the beans had reached the top of the canes. He was already out among them with the twine in his teeth, pointing the way.