Colour neo-traditional tattoo on the outer thigh showing a pocket watch, planets and a banner reading All of Time and Space.

Pocket watch and planets banner on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo on the outer thigh shows an open pocket watch centred between two ribbon banners, with the text All of Time and Space and Where do you want to start? on them. Planets in red, teal and brown float around the watch against a dark, speckled background of stars. Bold outlines and saturated colour fills give it a classic illustrative finish, and the banners frame the watch symmetrically.

Neo-trad Thigh Pocket watch Planet Star Banner Script Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that coil of rope, girl, and mind the damp. No, the other end, where the tiller keeps the wind off. Now. You want to know how Ezra Pell came to own a watch that ran backwards on Sundays? Then listen, because I'll not tell it twice and the kettle's nearly boiling.

Keep reading

He came up the Grand Union in the winter of the big frost, on a boat painted like a fairground, with no cargo and no horse. Folk on the towpath asked where he was bound. He'd tap the lid of his brass pocket watch, the one with the cracked glass, and say, "All of time and space, madam. Where do you want to start?" Half of them laughed. The other half went home and didn't sleep.

The watch had a little orrery of planets inked on its back, red and teal and one the colour of a biscuit, and on frosty nights you could see them turning under the lamp. Ezra would open it at Braunston lock and set it to whatever year you'd lost, and the water would go still for the length of a held breath. My mother swore she once saw her own wedding float past in the reeds, dripping and perfect.

Then, the spring the locks were sold off, he left the watch on the lock beam with a note pinned to it: Start with the one you can mend. Nobody did, for years. Then one morning I found the glass cleaned and the hands moving the right way round, and I've been steering this boat ever since, waiting for someone to ask me the question back.