Traditional style colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a banner reading CAN'T KEEP UP, a red rose and green leaves.

Pocket watch and rose with banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a gold pocket watch with Roman numerals and hands on a pale face, wrapped by a white banner that reads CAN'T KEEP UP. A large red rose and green leaves fill the background on the right and top. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat colour fills and light shading on the watch and banner.

Traditional Upper arm Pocket watch Banner Rose Leaves Roman numeral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch came in on a wet Tuesday, its gold case dented on one side and its face gone the colour of weak tea. Nell Gorringe had been apprenticed to Ambrose Tulley for three weeks and had yet to be trusted with anything that mattered, so she was given the pocket watch to open while he dealt with a woman who wanted her mantel clock silenced at night.

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The owner was a railway guard called Joseph Crane, who had written a single line on the paper slip pinned to the bag: can't keep up. Nell asked what he meant. He shrugged and said the watch ran fast, always a minute ahead of the signal box, and the inspectors had docked him twice for it.

She found the trouble under the balance wheel, a hair of grit and a mainspring wound too tight for too long. Ambrose came over, studied it through his loupe for a long time, and told her to leave the regulator alone. It isn't broken, he said. It's doing what it was built to do. Most of us are the ones who fall behind.

She cleaned it anyway, because that was the job, and when she closed the case she noticed a rose engraved inside the lid, its petals worn smooth by a thumb that had opened it a thousand times. Crane came for it on Friday. He held it up to the window, saw the hands sitting where he'd left them, and laughed for the first time since he walked in. Right, he said. Let the rest of them catch up.