Realistic black, grey and red tattoo of an ornate pocket watch surrounded by acanthus scrollwork across the back of a hand and forearm.

Pocket watch and scrollwork on hand and forearm

Realism · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch with a visible dial and hands sits at the centre of a dense ornamental design of acanthus leaves, curling scrollwork and swirls that spreads over the back of the hand and up the forearm. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth and highly detailed, giving the leaves and metal case a three-dimensional, realistic look. Ink is mainly grey and black, with a patch of red behind the leaves on the forearm, set against a dark leather-like background.

Realism Hand Forearm Pocket watch Clock Scrollwork Swirl Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward's daughter carried the watch up the hill road the morning the bell cracked, wrapped in her apron, because her father had said the keep would not stand out the week and the silver ought to go somewhere safe. It was heavy for a girl of eleven. The case was worked all over with leaves that curled back on themselves like bracken in a frost, and the hands inside said a quarter past nine although the sun was already past noon.

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At the gatehouse Orla Venn, who kept the old clock in the tower and had never once been allowed to touch it, took the watch from her and turned it over in the light. "Who stopped it?" she asked. "Nobody," said the girl. "Father said it stops when the house stops being listened to." Orla laughed, but she did not give it back.

That night Orla climbed the tower with a lamp and the watch inside her coat. She set the hands by the shadow on the courtyard stones and wound the key until her fingers bled. Below her the great hall lay dark, the lord gone south and his stewards gone with him. When she came down at dawn the hands were moving, and the shadow of the broken bell lay across the yard like a finger pointing west.

The keep fell in the spring, as the steward had foretold, but not on any morning the watch was wound. The girl kept it all her life. Each year on the same day she carried it up the hill road in the same apron and set it on the wall, where the leaves had worn smooth under so many thumbs.