Black and blue tattoo on the upper arm of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, chemical structure drawings, ink splatters and script reading Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth

Pocket watch and script on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals and blue hands, surrounded by line drawings of chemical structures with hydroxyl groups and an amine label. Ink splatters and a blue ghosted copy of the script quote sit alongside the black lettering, which reads Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing. The watch is shaded in greys with blue accents, and the linework is bold and sketch-like across the upper arm.

Lettering Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Chemical structure Molecule Splatter Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell had kept the chemistry bench at Hallam Street Girls' School for thirty-one years, and the watch on its hook above the sink had stopped at ten past four the day the fire alarm went off in the prep room. Nobody had wound it since. When the new head asked for the lab to be cleared, Ada took the watch down, blew the dust from its hinge and found an inscription inside the case lid: To A.P., for the reactions you were never meant to try.

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Her nephew Tom, who drove a van for a pharmacy wholesaler, came to fetch the boxes. He found her at the bench with a notebook open and a row of brown bottles lined up like soldiers. "Dopamine," she said, tapping a sheet where she had drawn the ring with its two hydroxyl arms and the chain running off to the amine. "Every nerve in you runs on a molecule that small. It pulls you towards things. Anything that gets your blood racing is just this, going off in a dish."

Tom asked whether she meant to try it. She laughed and said she had tried everything once, which was how she came to be a chemist and not a poet. Then she set the watch on the bench beside the drawing. The minute hand, which had been still for six years, gave a small shiver and began to move, slow and certain, as though it had only been waiting for someone to say what the little thing was for.