Coloured pencil drawing of a gold pocket watch wrapped in green vines and leaves, with a red and blue rose below, shown as a tattoo design.

Pocket watch and rose with vines

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a gold pocket watch with Roman numerals on a white face, its hands set near twelve and three, with a grey shaded ring. Green vines with dark green leaves wind around the watch, and a red rose with blue outlines sits at the base. The design uses soft pencil shading on the watch and bold, outlined colour on the rose against a plain white background with faint pink dots.

Neo-trad Pocket watch Clock Rose Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last working pocket watch on Halden Orbital lives in a drawer beneath the hydroponics bay, and you are the only one who still winds it. Every seventh day the station's master clock drifts a little further from the sun that no longer rises over the ring, so you take the watch out, thumb the crown and listen to its small, stubborn tick. Your grandmother used to say a watch kept by hand is never really lost, only waiting to be remembered.

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The rose came up through a grow-tray by accident, a red bloom that opened on the wrong schedule and refused to close at night. Mira from the algae lab called it a mutation and wanted to bag it for study. You pressed one velvet petal into the watch case when she wasn't looking, and the vines that had crept along the pipes all summer turned toward the brass as if they had been waiting for it.

In the spring the council voted to strip the old clock tower, reasoning that nobody needed a schedule when the shifts ran on fourteen-hour loops. You climbed up anyway with a torch and a borrowed spanner. The hands stood at ten past three, the hour your daughter was born on a planet nobody aboard had seen in a century, and you decided the old clock had been right about that much at least.

When the watch finally stopped in your palm, you did not wind it again. You sat on the gantry rail, the rose open and red beside you, and let the station hum around you while the vines climbed slowly over your boots.