Line drawing of a pocket watch wrapped in lilies and ribbons on white paper, with one petal coloured purple, a botanical tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Pocket watch and lilies tattoo design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil line drawing on white paper shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals, its chain looping at the top, surrounded by several lily blooms with stamens and trailing ribbon scrolls. The linework is clean and fine with light shading around the watch face and petals. Only one lily petal is coloured in purple, while the rest of the design is uncoloured, and two coloured pencils rest on a wooden table beside it.

Botanical Fine line Pocket watch Lily Flower Ribbon Clock Stamen Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock above the door of the Lilyhall dance room in Thornley had stopped at ten to midnight the winter the band went south, and nobody in the village would touch the winding key. Agnes Feld swept the boards under it every morning all the same. She said a stopped clock was only honest twice a day.

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Ada Pell came to the Saturday dances with a violet ribbon at her wrist and her grandfather's pocket watch on a chain at her waist. Tom Ruddock, a carter's son with mud on his boots, asked her for every waltz, and every waltz she said yes. Then a fiddler nobody knew came in from the rain with a lily in his buttonhole and offered to play until the clock was right again. He said the hour belonged to whoever could keep time to the fiddle. Tom did not like him, but Ada laughed and gave him her hand.

They danced past midnight, past one, past the point where the boards should have been cold. When Ada finally stopped and opened her watch, its hands stood at ten to midnight, just as the great clock did, and the fiddler was gone. Only a single purple petal lay on the floor where he had been standing, and Tom, who had waited at the door with a bunch of white lilies from the churchyard, said he had seen no one leave.

Agnes swept up the petal the next morning and tucked it inside the clock case. On Saturdays after that the clock ran again, always one minute slow, so the dancers in Thornley never quite ran out of time.