Pencil sketch of a tattoo design with a pocket watch, roses and script lettering, in a neo-traditional style.

Pocket watch and roses pencil design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil sketch on paper shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals and hands at the centre, flanked by two roses and a smaller bloom. Strings of beads, leaves and a second watch fill the space around the main face, and script lettering runs down the right side. The linework is light and sketched, with some shading on the watch case and roses, and the design is shown in black and grey.

Neo-trad Lettering Pocket watch Clock Rose Roman numeral Pearl Leaves Script Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harrow's fair had come into the market town on the back of three lorries, and by the second night the carousel was already losing its paint. Ada Penrose sat on an upturned crate behind the coconut shy, winding the brass pocket watch her father had left her, listening for the tick that told her the mechanism still had something in it. Paper roses drooped from the ride's canopy where the damp had got in.

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A boy from the helter-skelter had been pestering her all week to sell it. He offered four pounds and a bag of brandy balls. She told him the watch was not for sale, that its hands had stopped at twenty past eleven the spring the fair last came through, and that it only ran when someone wanted the hour badly enough.

On the last night the generator died at half past nine and the lights went out along the whole midway. In the dark, the watch began to tick. Ada found the boy by the hook-a-duck tank, shivering in his thin sleeves, and held the open case under his nose. The hands read a quarter to ten, and the roses painted on the inside of the lid had gone the colour of fresh blood.

"Go home," she said. "It's late enough."

He went. The fair packed up before dawn, and when the lorries rolled out past the church, Ada kept the watch closed in her palm, running steady, its hands turned back to the hour it had always wanted to keep.