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

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and a script word on its face is the central subject, set against shaded scrollwork and leaves. A large rose sits at the lower edge of the forearm, and the piece is rendered in smooth black and grey shading with strong highlights. The composition fills the frame of the arm, with the watch and rose balanced across the length of the forearm.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Rose Leaves Scrollwork

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the wind off the firth can't reach this side of the wall. You want the tale of the clock in the Keep? Then hush and mind the fire.

Keep reading

Lord Ambrose Hale carried a pocket watch on a silver chain, its case worn thin at the edges from his thumb. He wound it each night in the tower room with a key no one else was allowed to touch. The numerals were Roman, every one, because his mother held that a clock which spoke in Latin would never lie to a man. Beneath the twelve she had a word scratched into the enamel, a word for dancing, and when the watch ran fast she said it was the dancing that did it.

The winter the siege came, the watch stopped at a quarter past four and would not be coaxed. Ambrose shook it. He breathed on it. He laid it in a bowl of rosewater, as the cook swore a fishwife had taught her. Nothing. The garrison ate their last oats by a cracked bell, and the rose that climbed the east wall blackened with frost and let its petals fall onto the stones below the tower, one by one, like a count being kept.

In the thaw the enemy rode off without a blow struck, and the men climbed the tower to find the watch ticking in its owner's palm, though nobody had wound it. Ambrose opened the case. Pressed flat against the inner lid lay a rose leaf, still green, with the hour hand resting across it like a finger on a page.

Ambrose never learned who had turned the key. The steward's girl, the cook said, though the girl swore she had only been listening at the door to hear the clock sing.