Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cracked pocket watch with gears

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with a cracked face, exposed gears and numerals sits across the skin, with its case and chain drawn in shaded detail. The shading is black and grey, using soft gradients and sharp contrast on the metalwork and glass. A partly visible rose fills the right edge of the frame.

Other Pocket watch Clock Gear Numeral Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The watch stopped at twenty to four on the Tuesday, out past the salt flats where the road to Calder Wells runs straight for forty miles and nobody bothers with bends. You'd have laughed at me, sitting on the bonnet with the glass in my lap, trying to decide whether a crack across the face counts as a fault or a story. Dad always said a watch that's been dropped has earned its keep.

The man at the petrol station in Ruhle took it from me without looking at the dial. He held it to the light the way you'd hold a dead bird, turned the crown, and said the gears were fine and only the glass had taken the knock. He wanted forty pounds for a new crystal. I said no, and he shrugged and told me the old one would tick for a hundred years if I left it alone, which is the sort of thing a man says when someone else has already paid him.

So I'm keeping it cracked. Every time I look at the numerals the nine splits in two and the four has a hairline running through its loop, but the hands keep going round regardless, as if they haven't noticed. There's a rose pressed against the case, from the page of Gran's wedding book where she left it, and the petals have gone brown at the edges. I've threaded the chain through my belt loop so I can't lose it at the next fuel stop.

I'm driving back on Sunday. Tell Mum I'm not lost, just slow.

Love, Jo