Black and grey realism tattoo of an open pocket watch with a chain and key, above a shaded rose, on a lower leg.

Pocket watch and rose on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

An open pocket watch with its lid raised sits at the top of the design, with a chain and a small key hanging beside it. A shaded rose sits below, and soft grey washes fill the background behind the objects. The work uses fine detail and smooth tonal shading in black and grey only.

Realism Calf Pocket watch Clock face Chain Key Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Carbrook House had been broken since Tuesday, so Nell Gaskell took the stairs with a cardboard box balanced on one hip. Flat 14 had belonged to Mr Anand Pillai, who had lived there for thirty-one years and never once complained about the wind. The housing officer had said to take what she wanted before the clearance men came on Friday. Nell wanted very little. She wanted the window box, which still held a dead geranium and one stubborn rose cutting standing in a jam jar.

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In the kitchen drawer, under a tin of Bourbon biscuits and a hundred perished rubber bands, she found the watch. It was silver, the lid dented on one side, with a chain looped through its bow and a small brass key dangling from the ring. She pressed the catch and the lid sprang open. The hands had stopped at twenty past four. Something folded slid out from behind the dial: a photograph of a woman laughing on a pier, its corners soft as cloth.

She sat on the bare floor with her back against the radiator and thought about how long a thing could go on counting after the person who needed it had gone. She fitted the key the way the old man must have done every morning and turned it, six clicks, until the balance wheel started its small, tremulous argument with time. Down on the street a bus sighed at the kerb. Nell found she was listening to that instead of the watch.

On the landing she left the rose cutting on the window sill, where the light could reach it. Then she put the watch in her coat pocket, lid open against her hip, and carried it down fourteen floors, ticking so faintly she could feel it more than hear it.