Pencil drawing of a cracked pocket watch with Roman numerals, two shaded roses and script lettering, drawn as a tattoo design.

Pocket watch and roses pencil design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a pocket watch with a cracked face and Roman numerals, flanked by two shaded roses with leaves and a large Roman numeral IX. Script lettering reads "scars remind us of what time forgets" across the composition. The drawing uses soft graphite shading and fine hatching in greys on cream paper, with the roses and watch case rendered in a realistic style.

Realism Lettering Pocket watch Clock Rose Roman numeral Script Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways down Crane Lane since seven, and by nine the tarpaulins over the stalls sagged like wet sheets. My uncle Tobias kept his watch-mending bench under the awning by the bakery, a glass case of dead movements and a lamp clipped to a coat hanger. Next door, Mrs Okafor was wrapping her last bunches of red roses in newspaper, and she shouted over the gutters that the weather would have them all limp by Sunday.

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The man came in just as the lamp started to buzz. He set a pocket watch on the green baize, face up, and the glass had a crack running from the XII down past the III, a silver line where something had struck it hard. He wanted it to run again. It had been his father's, he said, and had stopped on the morning of the funeral, the hands stuck at twenty to four. Tobias turned it over, held it to his ear, and said the movement was sound but the glass would stay.

"You'll want new crystal, surely," the man said. "It's ugly." Tobias shook his head slowly and pushed the loupe up onto his forehead. "Anyone can fit new glass. This tells you where it fell." He wound it, and it ticked, and the second hand jolted forward across the break. The man stood looking at it for a long time, rain dripping from the peak of his cap onto the counter.

When he had gone, I found a ring of damp on the baize where his hand had rested. Tobias picked a rose petal off the floor, one Mrs Okafor had flicked over the partition, and laid it under the watch like a bookmark. "Nothing forgets a drop," he said, "and nothing ever mends it quite the same." Then the lamp gave a small pop and went dark, and in the blackness I could still hear the watch going, counting out the rain.