Traditional style colour tattoo of a pocket watch framed by two red roses and green leaves, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pocket watch with a pale face, a single hour numeral and two hands sits at the centre of the design, with its chain hanging from the bow. Two red roses with dark shaded centres and green leaves wrap above and below the watch, all outlined in bold black linework. Soft shading on the watch face and rose petals gives depth against the plain white background.

Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Clock Rose Leaves Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at a quarter to four, and nobody in Harrowby would say why. Old Tobiah Maddox kept it in a drawer of his workbench, wrapped in a handkerchief that had once been white, and when children asked to see it he told them it was not for looking at.

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Rosa Pell, who baked the village bread and had no patience for riddles, came in one wet March morning with flour still on her wrists. She said the church clock was a minute slow and she wanted to know why a man who could mend anything would leave his own watch dead. Tobiah unwrapped it. On the inside of the lid two red roses had been painted by a hand that was not his, the paint worn to a shadow. "My wife did those," he said. "She said the hour would turn when I stopped counting it. I have been counting it for nineteen years."

Rosa took the watch up the hill that evening, past the stone wall where the wild roses grew thick and the leaves were still dark from winter. She sat with her back to the stones and talked, the way you talk when no one is listening, about her brother who had gone to sea, the loaf she had burnt the day before, and how the light fell across the valley. When the sun slid behind the ridge she looked down and saw the second hand moving.

The next morning Tobiah found the watch on his step, its chain coiled like a sleeping snake, and two new buds on the wall outside his gate. The hands read a quarter past six, which was the hour he had last come home to a warm kitchen.