Fine line tattoo design of a pocket watch surrounded by lilies, leaves and a string of beads, with pink-tinted linework on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and lilies in fine line

Fine line · Mixed · Photo

The design shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals, its hands and a small subdial, set among lily blooms, buds and leaves. Thin dark outlines carry most of the detail, with soft pink and red tones added along the lines and beneath the leaves. The composition fills the frame diagonally, with the watch at the centre and the flowers spilling out to the edges on a pale background.

Fine line Botanical Pocket watch Clock Lily Flower Leaf Bud Bead Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty past four, which Mam said was the minute the cage came up the last time, though Dad had never once owned to it. Ada wound it every Sunday anyway, sitting on the step of the back kitchen with the crown between finger and thumb, because the pit had kept the other things he carried down.

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The lilies were Mam's doing. She had planted a row along the yard wall the spring after the explosion, when the men were still going down in shifts and nobody on Cinder Row would look at the colliery gates. They grew tall and sour-smelling, and their pinkish throats opened every June. She cut them for the chapel windowsill until the steward asked her to stop, because the pollen marked the hymn sheets.

Ada had found the watch in the lining of his coat when she took it to the cleaner's in Ashby. The glass was cracked across the three and the back plate had a dent the shape of a thumb. Mr Pryce on Church Street said it would run for another fifty years if somebody kept it wound. Then he looked at her over his spectacles and said he supposed that was the trouble with them.

She took it home and set it on the sill beside the lilies. Each evening the sun came through the kitchen window and lit the dial, and the shadow of a bud fell across the seven and the eight. She sat with her tea going cold and watched the second hand go round, steady as a heartbeat, through the hour the cage used to come up.