Black and grey ornate clock tattoo with roses and scrollwork on the inner forearm, with a dotted chain hanging below the dial.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate clock and roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an ornate pocket clock with Roman numerals, surrounded by scrolling filigree and rose blooms, sits on the inner forearm. A dotted chain hangs from the base of the clock, and the linework combines bold outlines with fine shading in the frame. The plain olive green background keeps the tattoo as the clear focus of the composition.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Clock Rose Scrollwork Chain Flower Pocket watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oddy kept the pocket clock in the window of his shop on Carver Street, face turned so customers could admire the roses wound around its frame. It had stopped at twenty past four in the spring my father died, and nobody had thought to wind it since. My mother wanted it sold. I wanted to know why it had stopped at all.

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The chain was the first thing I noticed, a fine run of silver beads dropping from the bow like a plumb line. Mr Oddy said a watch on a chain was meant to be carried, not hung, and that the beads were a lady's trick, to make the case swing when she walked. I turned it over in my palm. The metal was warm from the sunlit glass, and the scrollwork pressed into my skin like the lace on a christening gown.

I took it home on the Saturday and sat at the kitchen table with my father's loupe and a tin of watchmaker's oil, working the way I had seen him work on the church bells. Behind the back plate I found a slip of paper folded to the size of a fingernail. In his cramped hand it said: Wind it at the hour you are willing to start again. Nothing more.

I set the hands to twenty past four and then sat with it, unwilling to wind it at all. At a quarter past seven the kettle began to tick on the range. I wound the crown three times, slowly, and the second hand gave a small, stubborn shiver before it began its walk. My mother's tea went cold while I listened.