Black linework flash design of a pocket watch framed by five-petal flowers and leaves, drawn in a traditional style on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and flowers flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of an open pocket watch with a ring bow, a star-shaped hand arrangement and a double-ruled case, surrounded by three open five-petal flowers, leaves and a bud. The design uses bold black outlines with fine hatching and dotted flower centres, with no colour. The composition is a tight, rounded cluster set against a plain paper background.

Traditional Pocket watch Clock Flower Leaves Bud Star

Find an artist for this

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 watch had stopped again by the time the snow reached the second cairn, and Maddalena Crisp, who kept the toll house at Harrow Gap, knew better than to trust it. She held it under the lamp. The ring bow was worn smooth where a thumb had rubbed it for forty winters, and the star of hands stood still at a quarter past four.

Keep reading

Her grandfather used to say the watch was no clock at all but a compass for travellers. It ran fast when someone wanted to reach home and slow when they didn't. Nobody in the valley believed him, but they still asked to borrow it before a crossing. When Ivo Brand came down off the north road with his mule and a sack of salt, four days late and grey to the lips, she set the open case on the counter beside his cup and waited.

He watched the hands for a long while. Then he said his daughter had been sick in the spring, and that he had promised to be back before the gentians opened on the south ridge. Maddalena wound the watch with three slow turns. The star moved, and the flowers pressed into the case beneath the glass seemed to lift a little, the way they did in a warm room. She told him to keep the ridge on his left, follow the blue where the snow thinned, and not to stop for the bells he would hear, because the bells were only the wind.

He left before first light, the mule's harness creaking as it went. Maddalena closed the lid after the sound had gone and found the ring bow warm against her thumb, though the stove had been out since midnight.