Black ink drawing of an ornate pocket watch with Roman numerals, wrapped in rose petals and ink splatter, shown as an unplaced tattoo design on paper.

Pocket watch and rose design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink drawing of an open-faced pocket watch with Roman numerals, ornate filigree on the case and a loop bow at the top. Rose petals and leaves wrap around the lower left and bottom of the watch face, with sketchy hatching and dotwork shading and scattered ink drips. The design is drawn in black on a pale background, with no colour and no body part visible.

Botanical Neo-trad Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Rose Petal Leaves Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The case came back to Mr Alder's bench on a Tuesday, wrapped in a handkerchief that smelled of violet water. Inside the hinged lid someone had pressed a rose, brown now and paper thin, and its petals had bled a faint stain onto the enamel around the winding stem. Mr Alder had mended watches in Scarborough for forty years and had learned not to ask customers why they wanted a thing fixed. He only asked what time they wanted it to say.

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The owner was a Miss Quail, who came in each Friday to check on it, though it had been running perfectly since the second week. She would stand by the window while he polished the glass and tell him how her father had given it to her mother on the morning of the regatta, and how the minute hand had stuck at twenty to four ever since the storm. Mr Alder listened and turned the balance wheel with a pegwood stick, watching the hairspring breathe.

On the last Friday he set the hands to the true hour and closed the case. Miss Quail opened it again, looked at the rose, and laughed, a short surprised sound. 'He wrote to me every week for a year,' she said. 'I never once opened the lid.' Mr Alder said nothing. He had found the letters folded flat beneath the movement, forty-odd of them, and had put them back exactly where he found them.

She paid him in coins, too many of them, and left the watch ticking in her palm. Out on the harbour the gulls were quarrelling over the fish boxes. Behind the counter the wall clock read a quarter past nine, a minute slower than the watch, and Mr Alder did not correct it. Some hours were better kept a little behind.