Pencil sketch of an open pocket watch with a dangling chain, drawn in black and grey on paper, shown as a tattoo design without any skin visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and chain sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a pocket watch with a decorative case, shown at an angle with its chain hanging down and looping at the bottom. The linework is fairly loose and sketchy, with light hatching and shading on the watch case and chain links. The image is in black and grey on a plain off-white background and has no body part visible.

Pocket watch Chain Clock Sketch

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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

The caller had sung out the last reel at ten to midnight, and Ada Pryce still had three couples on the boards when Tom Greave frowned at his pocket watch. He held the silver case to his ear, shook it, and said the works had gone quiet. The lamps guttered then, as if a door had opened somewhere in the night.

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The stranger came in out of that dark, a tall man in a grey coat with a chain hanging from his fob to the floor. He took the watch from Tom's hand without asking, opened it, and looked at a face of Roman numerals with no hands at all. Then he asked Ada for one turn around the room before the hour was out. Her mother always said never to dance with a man who would not give his name, but the fiddle had already started, and her hand was in his before she had decided anything.

They went round once, then again, and the stranger never once looked at his feet. Somewhere in the second circuit the ticking of the watch grew louder than the fiddle, so loud that the couples stopped and stood listening. Ada counted twelve beats, and then he let her go. When she turned, there was only a chain coiled on the chair by the door, its last link still warm, and Tom's watch was running again with the room's clock as if nothing had happened.

Ada hung the chain on a nail in her kitchen and never wore it, though the village boys wanted to know why a girl would keep such a thing. On the anniversary of that night, she says, the chain grows a little heavier in the hand, and if you hold it to the lamp you can see where the links have been worn bright by someone else's fingers.