Realistic black and grey pocket watch with a dangling chain and a teal star tattoo on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and star on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a realistic pocket watch tattoo with its open chain looping down the arm. The watch face, Roman numerals and hands are shaded in fine greys with strong highlights on the case. A teal outlined star sits below the watch in the lower part of the frame.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Chain Clock Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch was still ticking when Dale flung it onto the passenger seat, somewhere past Coyote Wells, and that was the first thing I held against him. Our father had carried it for forty years on a chain that ran from his waistcoat to a buttonhole, and it ran four minutes fast every day of them. Dale said it was the only honest clock in California. It told you that you were already late, so you might as well stop pretending.

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Ninety miles of Route 78 had no shade and no signal. The needle on the dash sat past the red, and the hands inside the little dial kept creeping towards one o'clock, the chain swinging every time the car lurched over the washboard. Dale wanted to sell the watch in Blythe to a man who collected railway time. I wanted to put it back in the glovebox where it belonged. We argued for an hour about who had the right to be late.

At the Chocolate Mountains turn the road bent east and the heat came off the tarmac in sheets. The car coughed, then stopped. Dale got out and stood in the white glare, squinting at the sky the way our father used to squint at a bad horizon. I unhooked the chain from the mirror and wound the crown slowly, the way I had watched him do a thousand mornings.

When I looked up, Dale had his hand flat on the bonnet and he was laughing. 'Four minutes,' he said. 'We've got four minutes, and then we're both on time.' I didn't ask him what he meant. I just opened the case and let the hands run on without us.