Realistic black, grey and red tattoo of an ornate pocket watch within scrollwork and feathered leaves, covering the forearm and back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and scrollwork on forearm and hand

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a pocket watch face with a small keyhole-like detail at its centre, surrounded by acanthus-style scrollwork, feathered leaves and swirling smoke-like forms. The linework is layered with soft shading that gives the metal and leaves a three-dimensional look, and the ink is almost entirely black and grey with a few patches of red behind the upper forearm. The design wraps from the forearm over the back of the hand, with the watch sitting on the hand and the scrolls flowing up the arm.

Realism Forearm Hand Pocket watch Scrollwork Feather Leaves Swirl Keyhole Flame Clock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had wound the great clock of Saint Ebba's every evening for thirty-one years, and every evening the abbot asked him the same question: how long until the fire in the west wing is out? The clock had no answer for that. It only counted.

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The night the flames came up the hill from the wool store, Anselm ran to the belfry with a pocket watch in his fist, the one his mother had pressed on him at the gate. Its case was worn to grey, and its scrolled back was full of leaves nobody had polished in a century. He opened it on the stone sill. The hands had stopped at a quarter past two. He tapped the glass and nothing moved. He pressed his eye to the small brass keyhole at the centre of the face, as his grandfather had taught him, and heard only a soft hiss, like smoke turning over on itself.

He wound it with the key from around his neck. The hands leapt. Somewhere below, the bell rang once, out of turn, and the flames on the lower roof bent away from the cloister like a congregation turning from the altar. The villagers said afterwards that the smoke had shaped itself into feathers above the chapel, and that a hand had come down out of it to lift the watch from the sill. Anselm never argued. He only said the watch had run slow for years and had decided, that night, to be right.

In the grey morning the abbot found him asleep against the bell rope with the watch open in his palm. The abbot asked how long until the west wing was safe. Anselm held up the watch and showed him the hands, still at a quarter past two, and said that was as long as it would take.