Realistic black and grey pocket watch with pink cherry blossoms and a white ribbon, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and cherry blossom on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed pocket watch with Roman numerals and a quartz dial sits at the centre, with a silver chain loop at the top. Pink cherry blossom flowers and a flowing white ribbon wrap around the watch, with soft grey shading across the metal and the skin. The composition is vertical, with the watch sitting in the middle and the ribbon trailing down to the bottom of the frame.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Cherry blossom Flower Ribbon Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watchmaker's daughter carried the pocket watch up Hollin Hill the week the cherry trees came into flower, wrapped in a handkerchief the colour of weak tea, because her father's hands had started to shake and nobody in the town would trust a trembling man with a balance wheel. The watch belonged to Mrs Ada Veal at number nine, who had stopped it herself the night the telegram came and had not wound it since. Its dial said QUARTZ in small letters below the twelve, which her father swore was a lie told by a Swiss salesman in 1931.

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Betty stood on the step while Mrs Veal turned the case over in her fingers. The ribbon painted on the back had faded to the grey of old string. 'You can't mend what someone stopped on purpose,' Mrs Veal said, not unkindly. 'It isn't broken,' Betty said. 'It's only waiting.' She had no idea where the words came from, only that her father always said a watch keeps the time of whoever last held it.

Mrs Veal wound it. The second hand stirred, shuddered and went round. A petal came off the tree over the gate and settled on the glass, then another, and Betty watched the minute hand drag forward with each one as if the blossom were pulling it along by a thread. When the church clock across the valley struck noon, the hands had left the hour they had been stuck at and were still going.

'There,' said Mrs Veal. She closed her hand around the watch and did not give it back. Betty walked down the hill with an empty handkerchief, and behind her, through a door she never saw opened, a clock ticked steadily on.