Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a gold-rimmed pocket watch with rope, a skeletal hand and a grey banner reading WAKE UP DEAD.

Pocket watch and skeletal hand on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pocket watch with a gold ring and Roman numerals sits at the centre, with a looped rope hanging from its bail and a grey skeletal hand gripping its rim. A black-outlined banner across the lower part reads WAKE UP DEAD, and a bony shape descends beneath it. The design uses bold black outlines, solid fills and grey shading, with gold and orange accents on the watch case against the skin tone.

Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Hand Skeleton Rope Banner Roman numeral Bone Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Eleanor Pryce kept the keys to Hollin Keep, a ruin on the Northumberland cliffs, and the gold-cased watch her father left her still ticked in her coat pocket, though it had told no true time since the tower roof came down. Tourists wanted the battlements and the story of the lord who lost the keep at cards and was buried standing up in the chapel. She never mentioned that the watch had been found in his fist.

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Each evening she climbed the spiral stair and checked the rope that the lamp-lighters had once hung from the postern ring. Tonight it was already down, freshly cut, its end singed black. Someone had been up before her. On the wet flags below lay the bronze gauntlet from the gate, its fingers curled tight around nothing, as though it had been holding on to something and had let go in a hurry.

She knelt and turned the watch over. The hands stood at a quarter to twelve, as they always did, but the numerals had shifted, XI crowding over the top of the dial as if it had been pushed there by a thumb. Beneath the cracked glass, a line of letters had been scratched into the metal where there had been none before, and she read them aloud before she could stop herself: WAKE UP DEAD.

Far above her, the chapel bell gave one slow stroke, then another, and Eleanor found she was counting along, the way you count the years of a debt you have only just learned you owe.