Traditional style tattoo of a pocket watch with a chain, a red poppy and an eye in a triangle on the watch face, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and poppy on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch with a beaded chain hangs above a large face with Roman numerals and a red-outlined triangle enclosing an eye. A red poppy with black outlines sits on the left edge of the watch. Bold black outlines, solid red and yellow fills and grey shading on the watch case give it a classic flash-style look.

Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Clock Chain Poppy Flower Eye Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule stopped at the third cairn and would not be coaxed further, so Maud Pennick took the pocket watch from her coat, wound it twice, and held it to the wind. The case had gone grey with damp, but the hands still moved. Her father had made it in Kendal the winter before the snow closed the road, and he had told her that a watch kept correct on a mountain was a watch that had agreed to something.

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Below the saddle the valley lay like a bowl of milk. Somewhere down there the poppies would be out in the meadows by the mill, red as the lacquer on the shepherd's gate, and the old women said the flowers opened only for people who had paid their debts to the hill. Maud had no debts she could name. She had a brother who had gone over the north face in autumn, and a promise made to him that she would be down by the feast of Saint Brigid. She had counted the days on her knuckles until they ran out.

At the top of the pass a figure waited on a flat stone, cloak the colour of old ash, face hidden under the hood. He held out his hand for the watch and did not ask for it. She gave it up, because her legs were done and the light was going. He opened the case with his thumbnail, studied the eye inside its red triangle, then the hands, and handed it back with the minute hand turned back a full hour.

"Ten more steps before you drop," he said. "Each one of them is yours now." Maud counted them. On the tenth she saw the mill roof below, the red flowers beside the path, and her brother at the gate with one hand raised, as if he had only been waiting for the kettle to boil.