Colour tattoo on the upper leg of a pocket watch with a chain, playing card suits, red lips and a heart, with the lettering 'Have I gone mad' and a quote in script.

Pocket watch and quote on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a gold pocket watch with a chain and a fob, a black clock face with Roman numerals, and a scrolling ribbon carrying playing card suits, red lips and a red heart. Script lettering reads 'Have I gone mad', 'I'm afraid so', 'You're entirely bonkers', 'But I'll tell you a secret' and 'All the best people are', set against the pale skin. Shading is soft and realistic, with black and grey lettering and gold, red and brown tones in the watch and motifs.

Lettering Realism Thigh Pocket watch Clock Chain Script Quote Spade Club Heart Lip Playing card Ribbon

Find an artist for this

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

Mira Okonedo-Hale had worked the night desk at the lost property office under Cannon Arch for six years, long enough to know that the city lost things in patterns. Umbrellas on wet Tuesdays. Gloves in December. Once, an entire iced wedding cake, which nobody claimed. So when the gold pocket watch arrived at ten past eleven, its chain looped through the handle of a bicycle bell, she logged it without looking up.

Keep reading

It was still ticking when she picked it up, warm from someone's pocket and reading twenty to midnight, though the real hour had already slipped past one. The face was black, the numerals Roman, and inside the lid someone had scratched a single word with a pin: Still. On the chain hung a small brass fob shaped like a spade. Outside, a night bus sighed at the stop and pulled away, empty and lit like an aquarium, and the radiator knocked twice as if it had an opinion.

Dev came through with the trolley and asked what she had. "Time," she said, and he laughed until he saw she wasn't joking. "Well, somebody's been careless with it," he said, reading the tag. "Or very particular."

At six, when her shift ended, she put the watch in the drawer marked unclaimed and then took it back out, because it had started to run faster in the drawer. She wound it. The hands leapt forward and settled on the wall clock's time exactly. On the form, under Owner's Name, she wrote nothing. Under Description she wrote, in her neatest hand, Keeps the right time for whoever is late.