Black and grey realism tattoo of a cracked pocket watch with Roman numerals, revealing gears and a stepped shape beneath, on an upper arm.

Cracked pocket watch with gears on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large tattoo on the upper arm showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, its face cracked open to reveal interlocking cogs. Soft shading gives the watch, gears and a stepped shape below it a three-dimensional look. The piece is entirely black and grey, with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a pale background.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Gear

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 shop on Tanner Lane had been closed since the spring, but Mr Hollis kept the key on his watch chain as though he still expected someone to come for it. I was the one who went in that October with a crate for the brass and found the big regulator still ticking on the back wall, eleven minutes slow, which was the first thing he'd ever taught me to fix.

Keep reading

He had a pocket watch he never let me touch. Silver case, Roman numerals worn pale, a hairline crack across the face that he said came from a tram stop in 1931 and that he refused to have mended. When I asked why he kept it cracked, he opened the back with his thumbnail and showed me the train of wheels inside, the teeth still bright, all of it turning as if nothing had happened. The crack, he said, was only the glass. The works had never noticed.

I found that watch in the drawer under the bench, wrapped in a handkerchief with his initials. Someone had scratched a line into the case beneath the hinge, a single cursive word I couldn't read until I held it to the window. It said come up. There was a flight of wooden stairs at the back of the workshop that led to a room none of us had ever been allowed into. The treads were worn in the middle, like a church step.

I climbed them with the watch in my fist. At the top the room was full of clocks, every one of them stopped at a different hour, and in the centre, a chair turned toward the window, where the light lay across the floor in the shape of a gear.