Black and grey realism tattoo of an ornate pocket watch with Roman numerals on a forearm, set over faded cursive script and a heartbeat line.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and heartbeat line on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed pocket watch with Roman numerals and engraved scrollwork on its case sits at the centre of the design. The watch is shaded in soft greys with highlights, and faded cursive script surrounds it, with a black fine line heartbeat trace running beneath. The image is in black and grey, shown against a dark fabric background.

Realism Fine line Forearm Pocket watch Roman numeral Clock Heartbeat line Engraving

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, the lift's been stuck since Tuesday, so we'll take the stairs and you can count the landings for me. Nineteen of them. My Dorothy used to say a man should know his building the way he knows his own pulse, and I never once thought to check mine until the doctor at the surgery pressed two fingers to my wrist and watched that little line on her screen jump like a scared cat.

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Now this watch. Silver case, Roman numerals round the face, and all that swirl work on the back that the Polish fellow on the ground floor swore was Victorian. It was my father's, who carried it down the pit at Shotton and up again every night for thirty-one years. It stopped the morning he died. I never wound it. I just kept it in the drawer with the letters, the ones on thin blue paper, half the words run where somebody's tea got spilt across them.

So when the council sent the man round to look at the lift shaft, I gave him the watch and asked if it could be made to go. He held it to his ear on the landing like a doctor, then took it apart on the windowsill with a tiny screwdriver and his tongue between his teeth. Came back an hour later with it ticking, and he said, Sir, it was only the spring that was tired. I said, aren't we all, son, and I went down the stairs whistling, counting, one, two, all the way to the bottom.