Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a beaded chain, above a key, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and key on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits in the upper part of the design, with its beaded chain looping down to an ornate key lower down. The clock face and metal casing are shaded with soft greys and fine highlights, and faint smoke-like shading surrounds the objects. Only black and grey ink is used, and the design fills the upper arm.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Key Chain Bead Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had wound the Bellwether since the fog came down over Aldgate Reach, so when the council sent me up the drowned stairs with its key, I looped the beaded chain twice round my wrist and climbed with the water still dripping from my boots.

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The room at the top was dry in the way old rooms are dry, all dust and the sour smell of paper gone soft. The watch lay on the sill where someone had left it, its silver case gone the colour of a wet slate, its hands stopped at twenty to four. Grey smoke crept through the cracked pane and curled around it like something that wanted to be let in. I fitted the key to the winding stem. It took three turns before the mechanism gave, and then a ticking started up, small and stubborn, as if it had been waiting all along for someone too impatient to hurry.

The smoke thinned. For the length of one minute I could see straight across the water to the old clock tower, where a girl in a yellow coat stood on the balcony with her hand raised, the way you wave to someone you expect to come back. Then the hands began to move and the view closed like a shutter.

I set the watch to the true hour, which was late afternoon, and left the key on the sill with the chain coiled round it. Down in the square, the gulls had started counting again.