Colour traditional tattoo of a gold pocket watch reading WELL SPENT, with pink and teal roses and green leaves, on an upper arm.

Pocket watch and roses with WELL SPENT dial

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A gold pocket watch with a chain hangs above a Roman numeral dial that reads WELL SPENT, with its hands set near the bottom. Pink and teal roses with green leaves surround the watch, with a faint purple and grey wash behind them. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour give the piece a classic traditional look, photographed close up against pale skin.

Traditional Upper arm Pocket watch Rose Roman numeral Clock face Chain Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cup, it's the only one left with a handle. This is Liverpool, the winter the Mersey froze at the edges and nobody would admit it. Behind the counter of a pawnbroker's on Cable Lane sat Mrs Hollis, who had heard every sob story the city could manufacture and believed about a third of them.

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One night after midnight, old Ezra Dunne came in off the cold store shift with a gold pocket watch on a broken chain. He laid it on the glass like a man setting down a sleeping cat. Mrs Hollis opened the case. The dial carried Roman numerals and, painted across its middle in black lettering, the words WELL SPENT. The hands had been left low, near the bottom, as if someone had stopped them there on purpose.

'Forty pound for the gold,' she said. 'Nothing for the sentiment.' He took the notes, folded them into his cap, and walked out into the sleet without a backward look. Mrs Hollis put the watch in the tray under her till and forgot about it for fourteen years, which is the thing about a pawnshop. Things wait.

Then one Thursday in November, he came back, older and greyer, with a bunch of supermarket roses wrapped in newspaper. He wanted the watch. He still had the ticket, folded soft as cloth. 'I spent the hours on what I had,' he said. 'Shifts and rain and my lass's birthdays. Took me this long to work out the face wasn't telling me off.' She wound it for him. The hands climbed past the bottom of the dial, and the painted roses on the case caught the lamplight, pink as the day they were made.