Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch with two roses on the top of a foot, with red painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses on a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and a hinged chain sits in the centre, flanked by two shaded roses with leaves and small curling sprigs. The shading is smooth and realistic, with soft greys on the watch face and dark, defined linework on the petals and numerals. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against the pale skin and dark leather background, and the foot is shown from the top at a slight angle.

Realism Other Pocket watch Clock Rose Leaves Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put another log on, the wind is trying to get in under the door again. Leave the lamp where it is, the tale needs it. A watchmaker called Anselm Brück carried a silver pocket watch up the goat track to the hospice on the pass every spring, because the brothers there had no clock that agreed with the sun. He wound it on the step each morning, and it kept good time all the way to the first snow.

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One year the snow came early, a week before the feast, and a young woman came stumbling up the track with a roll of dried roses tucked under her arm, pressed flat in oilcloth. She had walked up from the lower meadows to find the man who had promised her a cut-glass ring. He had not come. Anselm gave her his own bread and the chair nearest the stove, and asked what she wanted with a watchmaker. She said only that she wanted the hour back.

Anselm opened the case on the table. Under the glass lay a rose pressed flat, its petals gone the colour of ash, and beneath it a folded slip in a hand he knew too well. It said only: wind it at the pass. He had sealed it the winter his wife died, meaning to carry it home, and never had. The young woman went very still, the stove sighed and went out, and in that dark the watch ticked on alone.

By morning the snow had stopped and the sky over the ridge was the washed blue of a clean plate. The watch read a quarter past six, the hour Anselm had wound it every day for nineteen years. The young woman was gone down the track before the monks rang the bell, but the rose was still on the table, and the chair by the stove was still warm.