Black linework flash design of a pocket watch on a chain with two roses at its base, in a traditional 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 line drawing shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals on its face, hanging from a looped chain that wraps across the top of the image. Two open roses with layered petals and leaves sit at the bottom, and the watch is partly overlapped by the chain. The work uses clean outlines with no shading or colour, on a plain white background.

Traditional Botanical Pocket watch Clock Chain Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mags Tulliver would not let anyone wind the brass watch but herself. It hung from a chain on her caravan door at Hollin Bank, and every dusk she lifted it down, turned the crown three times, and hung it back up, the way her mother had before her. The fair was packing up behind her, the carousel horses swaying under their tarpaulins, and the lad from the rides stood waiting with a tin of coins he owed her for a winter's board.

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He asked her what the roses were for. The Roman numerals on the face were the hours, she said, and the roses were for the two men who had bet her the watch that she could not keep time for a year. Each rose had opened on a morning she had chosen, one for each man who lost, and when the petals were full the year would be done. He laughed and said that was nonsense, and she only pushed the tin back across the table and told him to count it again.

Next morning the tin sat on the step where he had left it, and the caravan was empty, the door swinging in the wind. The watch hung from the handle with its hands stopped at a quarter to twelve. Someone had pressed two roses flat between the pages of the fair's ledger, and beside them, in careful copperplate, she had written his name and the word paid.

He kept the ledger in his coat after that, and every market day he opened it at the roses and listened for a ticking that never quite left his ears.