Black and grey realistic pocket watch tattoo with Roman numerals and a looping chain and T-bar across the forearm.

Pocket watch and chain on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and an ornate scrolled movement sits on the forearm, with its chain looping up over the top and down the arm to a T-bar. The linework is crisp and the shading builds smooth metallic highlights and depth across the case, chain links and hands. The design is entirely black and grey, and the watch is centred on the forearm with the chain wrapping around the limb.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Chain Roman numeral Clock face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire, it spits, and don't you dare touch the glass. Hobb Tennery kept the last working clock on Carrow Deep, nine hundred metres under the ice, and he kept it on a chain, because a man who lives underground needs something to hang on to when the lamps gutter out.

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Every seventh day he wound it with a key the size of a thumb, and the brass scrolls in the middle would turn over like ferns opening. Roman numerals, painted by his sister before the rockfall took her, marched round the face in black. The governor's clerk came down one winter with a ledger and a smile and said the copper in that case would fetch forty rations. Hobb said nothing. He only drew the watch from his waistcoat, showed her the hour hand, which had stopped at the twelve, and told her it was the same hour it had been up top the day the sun went out for good.

The clerk laughed and left. That night Hobb took the movement apart on his bunk, one jewelled wheel at a time, and found a scrap of paper folded into the back case, written in his sister's hand: Wind it toward the light. He did not understand it until the spring thaw, when the rations ran to nothing and he walked the tunnels with the watch held out in front of him, the hour hand creeping toward the faint blue glow of the surface shaft.

It reached the shaft at a quarter past four by the old count. He hooked the T-bar through the buttonhole of his coat and let the chain fall, and the watch swung against his chest, ticking, while above him the ice began to crack with daylight.