Black ink drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a teacup on top, and feathers and leaves, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Pocket watch and feathers design

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of an ornate pocket watch with Roman numerals, decorative scrollwork and stylised lettering on the dial. Feathers, leaves and a small teacup surround the watch, with dense hatching and cross-hatching in the shading. The image is black ink on white paper, photographed at an angle on a desk beside a glass and a pen.

Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Feather Leaf Teacup Lettering Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker in Ashby Ferrers had one rule, which was that a watch must never be wound by someone who was late. Mrs Peverell came in on the Thursday with her son's wedding gift in a handkerchief, and she was twenty minutes behind her own appointment, so he would not take the watch from her. He made her sit by the stove and drink the tea his sister had left cooling on the sill, a cup with a gilt rim and a crack down one side, and while she drank it he took the watch apart on a square of green baize.

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Inside the case there was a feather. Nobody had put it there. It lay across the escapement like a bookmark, grey and soft at the tip, and when he lifted it the wheels did not move. Mrs Peverell said her husband had carried that watch to the Somme and back and never once let it stop. The clockmaker said that was not the watch's fault. He said a clock keeps time for the people in the room, and when the room is full of waiting it sometimes forgets which hour it is supposed to be.

He wrote the numerals himself that night, in a copperplate hand, and bordered the dial with leaves so fine they needed a glass to see. On the face he set the hands at a quarter past two, which was the hour her husband had proposed in the rain outside the Corn Exchange. The next morning the watch was ticking. Mrs Peverell collected it, and at the door she asked how much she owed him. He said she could pay on the day, when the boy was married and the hour was right, and she laughed and told him he would be waiting a long while for that.