Realism tattoo on the forearm of a pink rose in front of a black and grey pocket watch and a script banner, with colour only in the rose.

Pink rose, pocket watch and banner on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic tattoo on the forearm shows a pink rose layered over a grey script banner, a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a feather at the base. The banner, watch and feather are shaded in black and grey with soft highlights, giving depth. The rose is the only area in colour, and the composition runs vertically down the arm.

Realism Lettering Forearm Rose Pocket watch Banner Script lettering Feather Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty past four, which Clara's father always called the honest hour, when the shops were shutting and nobody pretended to be busy. She took it from the velvet tray and held it to the lamp. Roman numerals, a hairline crack across the glass like a frozen river, and the second hand still shivering against its pin as if it had not yet been told.

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He had mended watches in the back of a Hull chemist's for forty years and never once let a customer leave with a dead one. The rose was another matter. Every Friday a man in a navy donkey jacket came in with a single pink bloom wrapped in brown paper and asked for the watch in the window to be wound. It was never his watch. He never said whose it was, and Clara had stopped asking. She wound it, set it by the chemist's clock, and put the rose in a jam jar by the till.

This Friday the bell did not ring. Clara sat up with the jar until the harbour lights came on, then opened the case with the tiny steel key. Inside, folded to the size of a stamp, was a sheet of tissue in her father's careful hand: Keep it going until he comes for it. Under the paper lay a grey feather, the kind her father used to clean the pivots with, and a pencil mark where he had counted the hours.

The next Friday she set the rose on the counter herself and waited. At half past five the bell rang, boots stopped on the mat, and she did not look up until the man said her father's name.