Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and roses, with a skull above, on a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm, centred on a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a partly visible skull with beaded detail near the top. Three shaded roses surround the watch, with wisps of smoke or ribbon curling across the design. The rendering uses soft greyscale shading and fine highlights to give the roses and metal a three-dimensional look.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Pocket watch Rose Skull Clock Roman numeral Smoke Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the soup's still hot and the bride's father hasn't finished his second glass, so you've time for this. My grandmother kept a pocket watch that had belonged to her father, a signalman from Crewe. The glass was cracked clean across the Roman numerals, and its hands had stopped at a quarter to midnight, the minute the lamp went out in his box on a wet Tuesday in 1931. Nobody wound it after that. She put roses up the wall by the coal shed instead, dark red ones and pale ones, and every June she cut a single bloom and left it on the step for a man who was never coming back for his tea.

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The wind took the petals across the yard in long curls, and the neighbours said she was talking to the dead. She was talking to the clock. When she married my grandfather in the spring of 1938, she came up the lane with a rose pinned at her collar and the watch in her gloved hand, and she would not let anyone else hold it. At the wedding breakfast she set it on the trestle table, turned the key until it caught, and watched the hands swing round from midnight to the true time, which was, as it happened, a quarter past three in the afternoon.

She slid it back into her pocket, took my grandfather's arm and told the room the dead had waited long enough to see her married. It's in my coat now, ticking. I wind it every morning, and it has never once run fast.