Shaded sepia drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, three roses and a flowing ribbon, shown as a realistic tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch and three roses design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits at the centre, with its chain and crown visible, flanked by three open roses and a ribbon that curls beneath it. The linework is fine and the roses and watch face are built up with dense stippling and soft tonal shading. The image is rendered in a warm sepia monochrome on a pale vignetted background.

Realism Botanical Pocket watch Rose Ribbon Clock Roman numeral Chain

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty years I kept the lost property office at Ashworth Junction, and you would not credit what people leave behind on a platform. Umbrellas, mostly. Dentures once, in a tin. But the watches came in every week, a pocket watch or two, because men still carried them then and wound them at the kiosk with the tea urn running. The one I think of is a silver hunter that a young widow brought in on a Tuesday in March, the chain snapped clean, the glass fogged. She said her husband had left it on the bench by the parcels office, and she had come back for it three times and it was never there.

Keep reading

I took it in my hand and it was still warm from her palm. The hands had stopped at twenty past four. I didn't say anything clever. I took it to Mr Pruett in the back room, who had hands like a surgeon and a magnifier screwed to his eye, and he opened the back and looked a long while and said, that's been wound by somebody who meant to come home. I asked him what he meant and he said the mainspring was new.

I sent the widow a card with the Thursday post saying it was found, and she came in and stood where you're sitting now. She didn't take it straight away. She looked at the face, the Roman numerals worn soft at the four, and she said, he always set it by the signal box, never by the station clock, because the station clock was always wrong. Then she laughed, and the laugh went somewhere else, and she put it in her coat and went out into the rain. Pruett had replaced the chain with a plain link. I never learned her name. Some things you keep for the handing over, not for the keeping.