Black linework tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, rope chain and flowers on an upper arm and shoulder, with faint red marks below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and flowers on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a rope-style chain, framed by open flowers and leaves that wrap around the upper arm. The design is rendered in black outline with no shading or fill, and the lines are clean and even. Faint red marks run along the lower part of the design, and the artwork is otherwise uncoloured, with pale skin showing between the lines.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Rope Flower Leaf

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 clock in the harbour office stopped at ten past four the week the ferry failed to come back, and nobody on Skerra would touch it. You take the pocket watch down from its nail anyway, because Auntie Morag has left it to you with its rope chain coiled in the case and a note in pencil that reads only: wind it on the hour, or the tide forgets us.

Keep reading

You learn the trick of it at the kitchen table, the crown turned between finger and thumb, the Roman numerals running round the face like gulls on a wire. Outside, the garden has gone to wild roses and sea kale that the wind keeps pressing flat. Each hour you open the back and count the ticks against the bell in the drowned chapel at the north end, and each hour the bell is a little later than it was.

On the ninth day a boy in a borrowed oilskin comes up the path asking for the harbourmaster. He says the ferry has been seen lying off the far skerry with its lamp burning and no one aboard. You don't believe him until you walk the shingle at low water and find a length of red rope trailing from the slipway, knotted the way Morag knotted her nets.

At the next hour you wind the watch, and the hands jump forward one full minute. Out in the dark the ferry sounds its horn, once, low and certain. You set the watch face-up on the windowsill, where the sea can see it, and go down to the water to meet the tide as it turns back in.