Black and grey realism tattoo of an open pocket watch with a hanging chain on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open pocket watch with chain on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch sits open on the skin, with its cover swung to the left and a chain trailing off to the right edge of the frame. The clock face shows numerals and two hands, and the case has soft grey shading that suggests metal. The image is an even, close-up view with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a dark green background.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock face Numeral Chain Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch lived on a nail above the galley stove, its cover thrown open so the heat could not get at the works. Old Hollis had carried it aboard at Valparaíso and never said where he got it, only that his father had kept it through two wars and one shipwreck and it had never lost more than a minute in a year. I was seventeen and peeling potatoes for the Maud Carrick when he gave me the job of winding it every Sunday, which made me the only man aboard allowed to touch it.

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The trouble started off Ushant. The hands stopped at twenty past eight one grey morning, and Hollis, who did not hold with omens, went white and told me to leave it be. I did not leave it be. I opened the back with a butter knife and found a hair of silver wire caught against the escapement, and beneath it a folded slip of paper no bigger than a stamp, in a hand I did not know. It said only: Keep her face to the sun.

We ran north through the swell, and at every noon sight I held the watch against the sextant readings, and every noon it was right to the second. Hollis died the winter after in a Liverpool boarding house. He left me the watch in a biscuit tin with a note that read, Wind her on Sundays, and mind the numerals, they count what we didn't bring home.

I still wind it on Sundays with the cover open and the chain looped over my knuckle. When the second hand catches the light off the stove, I think of that slip of paper, which I never did answer, and I tilt the case a little towards the porthole, the way you would for a face that wants the sun.