Neo-traditional colour tattoo on a forearm showing a pink lily, a ribbon with script lettering, a Roman numeral pocket watch and a grey feather.

Lily, pocket watch and feather on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pink lily with dark stamens sits at the top of the design, with a grey ribbon bearing script lettering above it and a ribbon with Roman numerals below. A pocket watch with a shaded face and Roman numerals is set in the centre, with a dark grey feather and green leaves below. Bold outlines and smooth shading give the lily and watch depth, and the composition runs vertically along the forearm.

Neo-trad Forearm Lily Ribbon Script Pocket watch Roman numeral Feather Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in the gatehouse of Harrowmere had shown the wrong hour for as long as anyone in Crane's Hollow could remember, and nobody thought it worth the climb. Ada Penrose thought otherwise. She mended pocket watches for the farms below the ridge, and the one in her apron kept better time than the castle's great iron face. So one wet morning in March she carried her tools up the spiral stair, past the jackdaws' nests and the broken arrow slits, to see what the wheels had been doing all these years.

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Inside the works the trouble was plain. A pin had worked loose from the hour wheel, and the whole mechanism had been dragging and stopping. Tangled in the teeth was a long grey feather, and beside it a scrap of ribbon faded to the colour of ash. Ada knew the story. The lord's youngest son had tied a ribbon to the gate before he rode for the coast, and his mother had planted white lilies along the wall to watch for him. The lilies had gone pink with the years, as lilies do when nobody tends them.

She fixed the pin, wound the great key until her wrists ached, and set the hands by her grandfather's watch. The gears took hold with a groan that rolled down the hillside. When the bell struck twelve, the whole valley looked up, and a man stepped off the cart road in a coat that had seen the sea.

Ada stayed at the gate while he read the names cut into the stone, and she did not tell him the clock had been wrong all along. Some hours are only true once someone is waiting for them. She tucked the feather into her apron beside the watch and walked home without once checking the time.