Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an open pocket watch with Roman numerals, framed by shaded roses and leaves, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses design sketch

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and ornate hands, surrounded by three roses and several leaves. The linework is fine and sketched, with grey graphite shading on the petals and watch casing and red and blue pencil used for outlines and highlights. The subject is centred on the watch, with the roses layered above and below it on a pale pink background.

Botanical Pocket watch Rose Leaves Roman numeral Clock face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the dog. You want the tale of Ada Pardoe's watch, and you'll get it straight, though the road out past Saltbrush Wells bends a story the way the heat bends a fence post. Her father left her a pocket watch with Roman numerals worn soft as biscuit, and nothing else but a debt to a man in Barstow and a jam jar of roses gone brown at the edges.

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She drove that watch out to the well every Sunday, because the hands ran fast and she believed that if she could catch them she might get back the mornings her father had spent bent over the bench. The road ran out flat and white, and the leaves on the dash turned from green to the colour of old pennies. With every mile the minute hand jumped a little, eager, like a man late for his own wedding.

At the well there was a boy called Teodor who mended pumps and nothing else. He turned the watch over in his oily fingers, laughed at the back of it, and said, 'It doesn't keep time, missus. It keeps what you've left behind.' He pressed the crown and the hands stopped at a quarter past eleven, the hour her father died. Ada sat on the tailgate and waited for the feeling to come, but the sun only dragged the shadow of the pump across the sand.

She drove home with the watch ticking slow in her lap, and when she reached the dash the roses had opened again, pink as a sunburn, wrong for the season and right for the road.