Black and grey realism tattoo of a lion with a flowing mane and a pocket watch beside it, with a Leo star sign above, on the upper leg, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and pocket watch on the upper leg

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion with a full, flowing mane faces forward and slightly upward, with a Leo zodiac symbol above its head and a pocket watch with Roman numerals at the lower right. The work uses smooth shading and fine hair detail in black ink and greys, with dark swirling smoke shapes framing the lower edge. The three panels show the same tattoo from the front and at angles, with the lion and watch filling most of the frame.

Realism Thigh Lion Mane Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Zodiac Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 6.14 was eleven minutes late, and Walter Pryce had stopped apologising to the empty benches an hour back. He stood under the iron canopy at Cold Ashby Junction with his father's watch open in his palm, thumbing the hour hand as if it might be persuaded. Smoke from the signal box chimney leaned west across the sidings, thick and slow, the colour of wet slate.

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The watch had come to him the winter the lamps were still lit by hand. His father, a signalman with a voice like gravel in a tin, had pressed it into his palm with the Leo fob swinging from the chain. "Set it by the box, not the station clock," he had said. "The station clock's a liar in a waistcoat." Walter had kept it right for twenty-six years, the Roman numerals worn pale by his thumb, the glass cracked once at Easter and never replaced. Tonight the numerals and the minute hand disagreed about everything.

A girl came down the footbridge steps with a carpetbag and a ticket for the coast. She asked whether the train would wait. Walter looked along the rails, where the lamplight ran in two long threads into the dark, and up at the smoke, which had lifted above the water tower into the shape of a mane. "It'll wait for you," he said, and found he meant it. He closed the watch over her cold fingers and told her to take it to the clockmaker at Saltmarsh, to say Pryce had sent her, and that it was the clockmaker's turn to be wrong.

The whistle went. She ran, the carpetbag banging at her knee, and the doors slammed shut behind her. Walter stood in the sudden quiet and listened to a church clock strike somewhere far off, one stroke late, and for once he did not correct it.