Black ink drawing of an ornate pocket watch with Roman numerals, a peacock butterfly and a smaller butterfly, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and butterflies drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed ink drawing of an open-faced pocket watch with a looped bow at the top, Roman numerals on the dial and hands set near the centre. Two butterflies overlap the watch, a larger one with eye-spot markings on its wings at the upper right and a smaller one at the lower left, with fine hatching and cross-hatching for shading. The image is greyscale on a plain off-white background, with a faint knotwork line visible at the left edge.

Pocket watch Butterfly Clock Roman numeral Bow Knot

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, Mrs Pollard never got round to it. Come in out of the wind and sit where the damp won't reach you. You want the story of the watch? Then you'll have to hear about the Fennimore sisters first, because the watch was never theirs to keep.

Keep reading

Sixty years back, the Seabreeze in Cromer Gap had a clock in the hall that ran four minutes fast, and every guest who came down late to breakfast blamed it. Edie Fennimore kept the books. Her sister Hattie kept the butterflies, two glass cases of them pinned on green felt above the piano, peacocks and painted ladies, and a small tortoiseshell that had come in on a coat hem one wet August and never left. Hattie said they were the only lodgers who paid in sunshine.

Then came the summer a man with a cough took the attic room and paid by the week in silver half-crowns, each one rubbed bright. He carried a pocket watch on a ribbon chain and would open it at the window, wind it, shut it, and never once look at the time. Edie asked him what it kept. He said it kept the hour his brother drowned, and that he meant to be somewhere else when it struck again.

On the last morning the attic was empty, the bed made tight, and the watch lay open on the sill with its hands at a quarter to four. Hattie found a peacock wing pressed flat inside the case, and beside it a note in pencil: keep the time, someone should. Edie still winds it every Sunday. It has never once been fast.