Colour tattoo of an open pocket watch with a chain and pink blossoms on an upper arm, with green and black watercolour-style splashes.

Pocket watch and blossoms on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo of an open pocket watch with its chain runs across the upper arm and onto the shoulder. The watch face and case are shaded in black and grey with fine detail, while pink and orange flowers, green wash and black ink splatter surround it. Colour ink is prominent, with loose, painterly edges and drips in the composition.

Upper arm Pocket watch Chain Flower Blossom Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The station clock at Lower Thorney had run slow for forty years, and nobody minded, because the 6.40 to the coast never left before seven anyway. Old Hale Brennan kept the only watch that counted. It was a silver hunter with its lid hinged open, carried on a long chain that caught the light whenever he leaned over the platform edge to check the rails.

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Every spring the cherry blossom came down the line from the orchards at Marrow Cross, carried on the wind through the open carriage windows, and it settled on the boards in pink drifts. Brennan swept it each morning and each morning it came back. One April a girl stepped off the late train with a ticket for a town that no longer had a station, and she asked him the time. He opened the watch and told her. She said her father had given her one just like it, and she had lost it somewhere between two stops.

Brennan did not believe in coincidence, but he believed in trains. He walked her down the line with the chain swinging from his fingers, past the signal box and the dripping water tower, until they reached the cutting where the blossom lay thickest. The rain had pooled in the ballast there, black as ink, and in the spray from her boot something small and silver glinted among the petals.

The girl knelt and lifted it free. Its hands had stopped at the same minute as his, and when she wound it the hands jumped and began to move together. Brennan put his own watch back in his waistcoat and, for the first time in forty years, let the station clock keep its own time. The blossom kept falling, and the 6.40 finally left on time.