Colour traditional tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, red roses and green leaves on an upper arm.

Pocket watch and roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and gold chain sits between two red roses with green leaves and yellow beads. The outlines are bold and the shading is smooth, with red and pink tones blended into the petals and a pale blue-white watch face. The tattoo wraps around the upper arm and fills most of the frame against a dark background.

Traditional Upper arm Pocket watch Rose Roman numeral Leaves Chain Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty to four, which Mr Fenwick said was the hour his father died, though he said it the way you might mention the weather. He wore it on a gold chain across his waistcoat and checked it against the clock in the Waltzer's control box, but he never let it out of his hand when he counted the takings.

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I was seventeen that August and had been given the job of greasing the chair-o-planes, which meant lying in the wet grass at six in the morning with a tin of lard and a torch in my teeth. Fenwick found me there and swung the watch over my face on its chain, like a hypnotist in a pier-end show. "Wind it," he said. "Go on. Nobody in this family has had the nerve."

I wound it. The second hand gave a small hesitant jerk, then ran, and Fenwick straightened up as if someone had called his name across the field. He told me his mother had painted the roses on the fortune booth the summer she was courting, and that she'd sworn the watch would keep time for as long as somebody on the fair kept the petals bright and the chain oiled.

We struck the fair in September. The lorries went out in a line down the A-road while the sun came up over the hop fields, and I rode in the cab with Fenwick's hand resting on the dashboard, the watch swinging gently from his thumb. Somewhere past Canterbury he flipped the lid open, looked at it for a long moment, and passed it to me without a word. It was ticking, and it said a quarter past six, which was the only time it had ever been right.