Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an open pocket watch with Roman numerals, a shaded rose and a script quote, with no body part visible.

Pocket watch and rose design sketch

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a dagger-like hand, with a shaded rose resting on its top and a faint second rose sketched in the lower corner. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and grey, with a small script line reading in a while crocodile across the watch face. The composition is centred on the watch with loose leaf and smoke-like outlines filling the background.

Neo-trad Pocket watch Rose Roman numeral Clock Script Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the watch before you learn the town. Mr Abernethy slides it across the counter of his shop on Tanner Street, the chain still warm from his waistcoat, and tells you the mainspring is tired but the case is sound. The hands are a dagger of blued steel he had made in Sheffield, and the Roman numerals, painted by hand before anyone thought such things mattered, run from I to XII without a single slip. Your job is to clean the movement and have the hour right before the 4.12 pulls out.

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The lid holds a pressed rose gone the colour of weak tea. Mr Abernethy says it came from a girl who married a farmer in Lincolnshire and never came back for it. Every evening that summer, the stationmaster's daughter, Vera, leans over the platform gate and calls out to the driver, "In a while, crocodile," a joke nobody in town can explain and everybody repeats. She laughs when you say it back to her, and you decide that is reason enough to keep the spring wound.

On the last Thursday of August the watch is finished, and you carry it down the hill in your coat pocket, rehearsing a speech you never quite manage. The train is already moving when you reach the platform. Vera is at the window of the third carriage, one glove raised, and you are too far away to say anything useful. So you take the watch out, flip the lid, and hold it up in the thin light so the dagger hand catches the sun and throws a bright line across the platform.

She sees it. She gives you a small, wicked wave, and the carriage slides away past the signal box. You stand there until the rails stop humming, the watch ticking loudly against your palm, and you say the words to nobody at all.