Colour tattoo on a thigh of a gold pocket watch on a chain, playing card suit symbols and a black script quote in a realistic lettering style.

Pocket watch and quote with playing card suits

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A gold pocket watch with a chain sits on the left of the design, with its face showing black hands and numerals. Black script lettering forms a quote across the centre, with black clubs, spades and red hearts and diamonds drawn with soft shading and a curling ribbon-like line above it. The watch and suits are shaded with mixed colour, and the lettering is set on pale skin with the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Realism Thigh Pocket watch Chain Playing card Club Spade Heart Diamond Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold pocket watch came into the lost property office at Harrowdene station in a brown paper bag, its chain coiled round it like a sleeping eel, and nobody had claimed it in forty years. Mr Ambrose, who had kept the shelves since the war, said it was worth nothing. The hands ran backwards on Thursdays and stood still on Sundays, and he would not touch it with bare fingers.

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On the first Thursday in March a woman in a red coat leaned across my counter and asked for a watch with a face like a sunrise. She knew the tag number without looking. I checked the ledger and the entry was in my own handwriting, dated the Tuesday before, though I had no memory of writing it. She laid three playing cards beside the ledger, a club, a spade and a heart, and said that was how one proved a claim at Harrowdene.

I asked where she had lost it. "Down the back of a looking glass," she said, and I took it for a joke until she turned the watch over and read the engraving aloud, which I had never once bothered to do. It said, in small careful letters, Don't be alarmed. Everyone here is a little peculiar. Then she wound the crown three times, and the hands ran forward without a sound.

When she had gone I looked again at the ledger. The claimant's name was no longer hers. It was mine, in the same careful hand, and the box for proof of ownership held a single small heart drawn in ink. I put the kettle on and stood by the window until the eight o'clock train rattled in, thinking that she had told me the secret after all, and that I was not the sort to say so.