Black and grey tattoo of a cracked pocket watch with Roman numerals and two dotwork roses on a forearm, with a ribbon banner above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the forearm, centred on a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a cracked face, set between two roses with shaded petals. A ribbon banner with Roman numerals sits at the top of the design, and a slender ornate object crosses the lower part of the watch. The linework is bold, with dotwork stippling used for shading across the roses and watch casing.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Pocket watch Rose Roman numeral Banner Clock Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, the rain had been coming down on the market since before the stalls were lit, and Tobias Crane was still under his awning with a pocket watch open on a square of green baize. Mind the drips, now. I'll tell you what he told me, and he never lied to a customer in forty years.

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The watch belonged to a woman named Edith Mallory, who had bought it from her father the week he went to sea and never came back. Its face had cracked clean across the Roman numerals the winter the Thames flooded the cellar. She brought it to Tobias on a Saturday, wrapped in a handkerchief, and asked him to make it tell the right time again. He said he could mend the glass, but the crack would stay, because some things keep the mark of where they broke.

Every market Saturday after that she came back with a rose from the flower seller at the corner, a red one for the first week and a white one after, and laid it on the baize beside the watch. Tobias never asked why. He kept the watch wound, and the roses wilted and got swept into the gutter, and by spring there were eleven of them pressed flat inside the lid where nobody would think to look.

On the twelfth Saturday the rain stopped for the first time in a month. Edith came in her good coat and found the watch ticking on the baize, the hands pointing exactly at the hour she had been born. She looked at it a long while, then closed the lid, put a coin on the cloth, and walked off towards the station without a word. Tobias kept the coin. The watch he kept ticking, because a thing that is wound will go on counting, whether or not anyone is left to check it.