Traditional style tattoo on a thigh showing a pocket watch with a dangling chain, framed by pink and peach roses and grey leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch with an open case and a dangling beaded chain sits at the centre, surrounded by two large pink roses, a smaller peach rose and a rose lower down. Grey leaves and the shaded watch case are rendered in black and grey with bold outlines, while the roses carry soft colour fills. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a patterned dress and a striped floor.

Traditional Thigh Pocket watch Clock Rose Leaves Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Walter, the clock in the front parlour has stopped again, so I have taken your father's pocket watch down from the hook and set it going on the kitchen windowsill, where the light is kindest in the mornings. Mrs Pargeter says the roses on the wallpaper are wrong for a seaside house, but she has never once answered the door to a lodger at five in the morning, so I told her to mind her teacups.

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The watch was in the drawer with its beaded chain still looped through the bow, the pearls gone grey from handling. Inside the open case someone has written "for Ada, till the tide turns" in a hand so small I needed the magnifier from the sewing box. I have no idea who Ada was. The boarding house has had seven Adas since the war, and I have stopped asking them their surnames.

Yesterday the Hollis boy brought back the roses I cut for the dining tables, two of them crushed and the peach one still whole. I laid them against the watch on the sill because it seemed a waste to throw them out. The pink ones have gone soft at the edges, the way the leaves do, and the watch keeps good time regardless, which is more than can be said for anyone in this house.

Come home at the end of the month. The room at the top is yours if you want it, and the chain can stay where it is. I will wind the watch on Sundays and leave the hands at whatever hour you choose to walk through the door. Your loving sister, Margaret.