Black line drawing of a pocket watch with roses, buds, leaves and a beaded chain, in a traditional tattoo flash style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an open-faced pocket watch with Roman-style numerals, a small crown and a beaded chain. Two full roses, two rosebuds and several leaves surround the watch, with the chain looping across the lower right. The linework is even and uncoloured on a plain light background.

Traditional Pocket watch Clock face Rose Rosebud Leaf Bead Chain Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the watch in the nettles below the north tower, its chain snagged on a briar that has grown up through the flagstones where the great hall used to be. The crown is green with damp and the glass has gone, but the hands still stand at twenty to eight, and when you lift it the second hand shivers once and stops again. Your uncle always said the Ashdown family kept their clocks wrong on purpose, so that no one could ever be late for a funeral.

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Nobody has lived at Carrow since the fire of 1841, and the roses have had the run of the place ever since. They climb the broken arches in two thick ropes, one white and one the colour of old wine, and every June they drop their petals into the well where the kitchen used to be. The gardener's boy, Tobias Lunn, who was paid in bread and cider, scratched his name inside the watch's lid. You can still read it if you tilt the face towards the light.

So you carry it down the hill to the village, past the lych gate and the shop that sells postcards of a castle nobody visits. The old woman at the forge holds it up to one eye, turns the stem with a pin, and tells you the thing isn't broken at all. It has only been waiting. She sets the hands to the church clock, which is four minutes slow, and the second hand starts to walk, neat as a clerk.

That evening you climb back up with a lantern and wind it again, though you still have no idea whose hour it is. Below you the roses have opened in the dark, and the chain lies coiled on the stone like something that has decided to stay.