Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a rose with leaves, on the forearm.

Pocket watch and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic pocket watch with Roman numerals and a script name and phrase on its dial sits above a shaded rose and leaves on the forearm. Fine shading gives the metal case, rose petals and leaves depth, with ornate scrollwork rising across the top of the design. The image is black and grey, with the cream dial as the lightest area, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock face Roman numeral Rose Leaves Scrollwork Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watchmaker in Sall Wells would not sell the pocket watch until the wind dropped, so Ada Merrin sat on his step with her boots in the dust and waited. The road beyond the last well ran straight for three days without a bend, and everyone who crossed it carried something that told the true hour, because the sun lied at noon and the stars lied at night.

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Her brother had gone out along that road in the spring with a rose cut from their mother's garden pressed inside his coat. He had promised to be home before the roses opened again. The watchmaker turned the case over in his palm, lifted the glass, and showed her the hands. They were set at a quarter past four, and he said they would stay there for as long as she kept walking.

She took the watch and the road took her. Each dawn she wound the crown, and each evening the hands sat exactly where they had been while the sand drifted over her footprints and the wind rubbed at the cream face until the numbers looked like old bone. On the fifth morning she reached the far spring, where salt traders said a man with a pressed flower had camped and gone on alone. They showed her the flat stone he had left behind, a rose scratched above a little heap of pebbles.

Ada set the case on the stone and let the sand settle over the rose. Then she wound the crown one last time, turned her back on the road, and started walking home, because the hands were finally moving.