Realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and several portrait faces on a forearm.

Pocket watch and portraits on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and visible gears sits behind a column of realistic portrait faces that run diagonally across the arm. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey and skin-toned blends on the faces and warm orange tones on the watch face. The design fills the forearm and extends to the edge of the frame, with a green area visible at the lower edge.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Gear Portrait Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker of Harrowgate Lane had a rule that no watch leaves his bench until it has been wound by the person who will carry it. So when the night bus driver Tomas Reyne came in with his grandfather's pocket watch, stopped at twenty to four, the old man turned it over twice and said nothing about the rule. He only asked who else had carried it.

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Tomas named them without being asked: his father, who drove the number nine until the depot closed; his uncle, who lost the watch in a card game and won it back; a woman called Elsie Mabry who had kept it in her coat through the winter of the flood. Each name the clockmaker wrote on a slip of paper and set in the tray beside the movement. By the time Tomas finished, the tray was full and the watch was still stopped.

The clockmaker opened the back and tapped a single gear with a brass probe. It was no bigger than a fingernail, worn bright on one side. Somebody had leaned on it for years, he said, the way a man leans on a door he is not sure will hold. The watch would run again only when the one who wound it stopped waiting for the others to come back.

Tomas walked home under the sodium lamps with the watch ticking in his palm. At the corner of the lane he took out the slips the clockmaker had given him, read each name aloud to the empty street, and wound the crown until it resisted. The hands moved at last, and the city kept its own time around him.