Pocket watch and roses on a thigh
Neo-trad · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo
A large black and grey tattoo on the outer thigh shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals on its face, a chain looping from its bow, and two shaded roses. Fine line blossoms and leaves sit around the watch, alongside bold filigree scrolls with lace-like detailing on the case. The shading is smooth and the composition fills the frame, with the design wrapping around the thigh.
Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.
A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The watch came over our counter on a wet Tuesday in March, wrapped in a handkerchief that smelt of violets. Mr Abel Creswell pushed it across with two fingers, as if it might bite, and said he needed eleven shillings by Friday. I opened the case. Inside the lid someone had pressed a rose petal flat, brown at the edges and still faintly pink at the heart, and beneath it an engraving half worn away: For E, till the hands stop.
Keep reading
I asked him whose hands. He said his father's, who had wound it every Sunday for forty years and died on the Thursday before Christmas with the key still in his waistcoat. The chain had been cut, not broken, which I noticed and did not mention. I gave him the eleven shillings and wrote the ticket in my neatest hand: one gold hunter, filigree case, rose inside, redeemable.
He never came back, and the ticket expired the way they do. In June a young woman in a green coat asked for a watch engraved with the letter E. When I showed her the petal she sat down on the bench by the door and did not get up for some time. She had been paying on the chain a little each week since the autumn, she said, and she had not known where the watch had gone. I told her it was not my business to know what a thing was worth to anyone. I only knew she was the first person to ask for it by name.
We wound it together on the counter, her thumb and my thumb on the crown, and the second hand went round as if it had never been anywhere else.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.