Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, roses and leaves, with the words Time Flies in script lettering across the lower half.

Pocket watch and roses with Time Flies script

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals and an ornate hands-and-crown detail, framed by rose blooms and leaves. The words Time Flies run across the lower section in flowing script, with a ribbon-like banner behind the lettering. The linework is sketchy and loose with light shading, shown in greyscale on a cream background.

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

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty past four, and Margaret Oduya knew it because she had checked it against the potting shed clock every morning for thirty-one years and never once found it wrong. Now it hung from a nail in the bothy wall with its glass cracked clean across the Roman numerals, and the roses on the south wall had dropped their second flush in a single wet week, the way roses do when nobody is coming to cut them back.

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Tomas came up the path with a barrow of compost and stopped at the door. "That's dead, Gran," he said. "Dead things don't need winding." She told him the Frenchman who sold it to her husband in 1962 had said exactly the same, and that the watch had only stopped because it was waiting for someone to ask it the time properly. He rolled his eyes, but he lifted the chain off the nail and turned the crown between finger and thumb, slowly, the way she had taught him to thread a needle.

The movement caught. The second hand shivered, then went round, and the small tick in that cluttered room was so ordinary that Margaret had to sit down on the upturned bucket. Tomas held it out to her face-up, and a single wet petal blown in from the window ledge had stuck to the glass, lying right across the place where the hands met.

"Leave it," she said. "It's keeping time with the roses now." He left it. Outside, the late buds were already opening along the wall, and she let the watch run on without correcting it, because the petal would dry and drop on its own when it was ready.