Colour realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and brass gears, with a spiral galaxy inside the dial, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and galaxy on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and visible gears sits at the centre of the design, with a spiral galaxy filling its dial. Soft, blended shading and bright nebula clouds in blue, orange and teal surround the watch, with small stars scattered across the background. The piece covers much of the upper arm, and another dark tattoo is partly visible at the left edge of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Galaxy Gear Nebula Star Clock Roman numeral Spiral

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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 clockmaker's widow had sold the shop by the time the watch came back to Halvard Street, and the man who bought it did not know what he had. He found it wedged behind a drawer of brass screws, a pocket watch with a cracked crystal and a face like a night sky. Roman numerals ran round the rim as they always had, but when he held it to the lamp the hands were gone, and the thing turning inside the dial was not a mechanism at all. It was a spiral of light, slow as breath.

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He tried to mend it the way his master had taught him. He took the movement apart and laid the wheels out in a row on green baize, and each tooth of each wheel had a tiny star stamped into it. He counted them twice. When he put them back the watch ran for an hour, then stopped, and the spiral had crept a finger's width closer to the centre.

Every night after that he wound it, and every night the galaxy drew in a little further, until one winter morning he opened the case and found the dial empty, a faint dust of blue and orange lying on the enamel. He carried the watch to the window. Over the rooftops a star he had never seen before was rising, and when he checked the watch against the church clock, both of them agreed on the hour.