Realistic shaded pocket watch with red cherry blossom branches and teal accents tattooed across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and cherry blossom on the back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded pocket watch with Roman numerals sits at the centre of the design, with a branch of red cherry blossom and falling petals crossing its face. The shading is smooth and soft, with fine detail on the watch case and numerals, and small teal streaks add movement behind the watch. Red and grey dominate the composition, which is framed by the curve of the shoulder blade.

Realism Botanical Back Pocket watch Clock Cherry blossom Flower Petal Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ashdown House had been broken since February, so Dorrie Kettle took the stairs to the ninth floor with a pocket watch in one hand and a carrier bag of onions in the other. Her grandfather's watch had stopped the week before, at a quarter to four, and nobody on the estate could say why. He had wound it every night for fifty years. Dorrie had not known until then that a thing could simply decide to stop.

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The clock on the roof of the block had stopped too, which the council took as a sign it was time to repaint the tower. Men came up with buckets and left again. In the courtyard the cherry tree that Mr Pell had planted in a tin bath the year the block was built went pink all at once, the way it did every April, and the wind pulled the petals up the stairwell in handfuls. Dorrie swept them off the landings every morning. By the third week she had a bin bag full and no better idea what to do with them.

On the fourth Sunday she sat on the bottom step with the watch open on her knee and a petal stuck to the glass. The hands were still at a quarter to four. She thought of her grandfather's thumb on the winder, the small click, the way he said a watch wanted feeding like a cat. She put her thumb to the crown and turned it. It ran. The minute hand shivered and went on, and up on the roof, through the grey rain, something heavy clunked into motion.

She still swept the landings each morning. The petals still came, and she let them lie a little longer each day before she picked them up. The block kept its own time now, one tick behind the watch, and nobody on the ninth floor minded being late for anything.