Pencil drawing of a melting pocket watch with Roman numerals, cogs and bird shapes trailing down, shown as a tattoo design sketch with no body placement.

Melting pocket watch with gears

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a pocket watch with its case and face melting downwards in drips. Roman numerals sit around the dial, and several cogs and fragmented bird or branch shapes fall away from the base. The drawing uses soft grey shading and fine hatching on a plain white sheet, with a mechanical pencil lying to the left.

Pocket watch Clock Gear Cog Roman numeral Bird Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Esperance's chronometer was kept in a tin box above the galley range, because Mr Thorne said the cook's heat kept the brass from seizing. I was the cook, so I was the one who noticed the box had gone soft. By the third day out of Falmouth the pocket watch inside had slumped against its lid like a candle left on a sill, its face sagging, the Roman numerals running into one another.

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Nobody believed me until the gulls started coming down. They dropped off the mainmast one after another, stiff-winged, their feathers gone grey as slate, and they lay on the deck among little brass wheels that Mr Thorne swore had shaken loose from the engine. I swept them over the side with the potato peel. A ship's boy learns not to ask questions twice, and I was only a cook.

On the seventh night the captain came down for his cocoa and found the watch hanging from its hook by a thread of molten silver, dripping onto the bread tin. He did not shout. He sat on the coal bunker and asked me what time I made it. I gave him the honest answer, which was half past the hour we'd left Falmouth, because that was where the hands had stopped.

We put into Lisbon nine days late. The owners docked my wages for the flour weevils, and the watch came ashore in my coat pocket, cold and heavy, still ticking backwards. I carry it now. Some mornings I make the porridge by counting the birds coming home.