Colour tattoo of a gold pocket watch with Roman numerals and pink lilies with green leaves on the inner forearm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and pink lilies on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A gold pocket watch with Roman numerals and a chain sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by pink lilies, green leaves and a blue background. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft shading on the watch face and petals. The composition wraps around the forearm, with the watch face angled towards the viewer and the lilies filling the lower section.

Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Chain Lily Flower Leaves

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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

Now sit closer, because the fair doesn't stay in one town long enough for a story to be told twice. Old Ambrose Tull kept the clock stall at the end of the Michaelmas fair, between the coconut shy and the man who swallowed fire. He had one watch in the glass case that was never for sale, a gold hunter with Roman numerals worn soft as bread and a chain that rattled whenever the ground shook.

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One wet October a girl called Nell Harrow came up the field with a bucket of pink lilies she'd cut from a churchyard. She sold them for a penny a stem and never once looked at the clocks, except at the gold one. Every evening she came back to press her nose against the glass. Tull told her the watch belonged to a man who had lost it in a card game and never come back for it. Nell said she would wait. So he let her wind it, which was his mistake, because a watch wound by a patient hand learns the hour its keeper wants.

The fair moved on to Hereford, then Ludlow, and at every stop the watch ran a little faster, until one frosty morning it stopped at a quarter to eight and would not be coaxed. Tull swore at it. Nell did not come that week, and the lilies went brown in the buckets by the gate.

He found her at last in the churchyard where she had cut them, sitting on a low wall with an empty bucket. She took the watch from his palm, held it to her ear, and laughed. Then she set the hands back to the hour she had first walked up the field, and the ticking started again as if it had never stopped. Tull packed the glass case that night and never sold another clock.