Realistic colour tattoo of an open copper pocket watch with Roman numerals and a pearl chain, set in front of a red rose on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and red rose on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an open copper pocket watch with a white Roman numeral dial, hands and a beaded chain hanging down the arm. A large red rose with soft petal shading sits behind the watch, and grey smoky shadows fill the background. Smooth blended shading gives the watch and petals a three-dimensional, photographic look.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Rose Pearl Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the tiller, you great lump, the cut doesn't care whose hands are on it. Aye, I'll tell you about the watch, since you've asked twice and the kettle's still cold. Old Tobias Crane kept the lock at Stowe Wharf for thirty-one years, and he never once trusted a clock that didn't live in his waistcoat.

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It was copper gone soft and brown at the edges, with a dial as white as a gull's belly and numerals as black as canal mud. The chain was pearl beads he had strung himself from the buttons of his late wife's wedding coat. Every evening he wound it, snapped the lid, and walked the towpath to see the last boat through before the gates shut. Lucy used to say the thing ran on spite. It ran on oil and habit, mostly.

The rose came off a narrowboat called the Marigold, which lost its load of dyed silk to the October flood and drifted onto his gate carrying nothing but red. Crane pulled three bolts from the reeds and hung them on the lock beam to dry. Fog came off the water that night thick enough to swallow a horse. He stood with the watch open in his palm, counting the hours by those Roman numerals, while somewhere below a bargeman shouted for a light he couldn't see.

The bargeman came through at a quarter past four, by Crane's reckoning, and the lock held. Nobody thanked him, which suited Crane fine. He closed the lid, let the beads slide back into his pocket, and blew out the lamp. Years later, when the wharf was sold for flats, a girl found the watch in a drawer, still ticking, and carried it down to the water. That's the end of it, and I'll not pretend it means more than the tide does.