Black and grey realism tattoo of an ornate pocket watch with Roman numerals and a shaded rose below it, on the forearm.

Pocket watch and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed pocket watch with Roman numerals and an engraved case sits above a shaded rose on the forearm. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, with strong contrast on the watch face and soft grey tones across the petals. The subject is centred on the forearm, with the watch chain running up towards the top edge of the frame.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Ashdown had been winding the same silver pocket watch since six o'clock, and it had stopped twice more since breakfast. Her uncle's shop on Bell Street smelled of clove oil and cold brass, and the wedding was at two. The bride had asked for the watch to sit on the pew beside the bouquet, but Ruth would not hand it over until it ran properly.

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Uncle Albert had kept the shop for forty years and used to say a watch wanted nothing from you but attention. She eased the case open with a jeweller's knife and found the hairspring bent like a fishing line. Through the shop window she could see the florist's van idling at the kerb, its back doors open on buckets of white roses, one of them crushed flat by the cold.

She straightened the spring with tweezers, holding her breath as if that would steady it. The balance wheel swung, caught, and swung again. Roman numerals shivered on the dial, the little seconds hand making its slow circuit of the sub-dial, and she thought how odd it was that a machine could be so patient about something so small.

At one forty she carried it up the hill to the chapel with a single rose from the van pinned to the chain. The bride saw it first and laughed, saying Albert would have fussed over the bent spring and pretended he hadn't. Ruth set the watch face up on the pew, where anyone walking down the aisle would see it, and the second hand kept going.