Fine line drawing of a pocket watch with a chain and key, trailing vines and flower buds, and the script words Life is what you make of it, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Pocket watch and vine design with script

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-style drawing of an open pocket watch lying on its side, with a chain ending in a small key, and thin curling vines sprouting buds and small flowers above it. The linework is fine and sketchy with soft grey shading on the watch case and foliage, and the script quote sits beneath the watch on a plain pale pink background.

Fine line Botanical Pocket watch Vine Flower Bud Chain Key Script Quote

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

The frost had not yet lifted from the cloister flags when Prior Hollis came out to find me, holding the dead abbot's watch by its chain as if it might bite. It had come up from the cellar in a cardboard box with his breviary and a tin of loose buttons. The case was silver gone the colour of weak tea, and the key still dangled from the chain, small and grey as a minnow. 'Nobody here can wind it,' he said. 'You have the hands for it, Brother. Take it out of my sight.'

Keep reading

I did not wind it. I hung it on a nail in the potting shed beside my gloves and told myself I would deal with it after Easter. Meanwhile the vine I had planted against the south wall the spring the abbot took ill went on doing what vines do when nobody is watching. It sent out curling tendrils, then a bud, then a pale flower no bigger than a fingernail, and by midsummer it had reached the sundial and begun climbing past the scriptorium window. Brother Ambrose complained that it blocked the light. I told him the light had never needed our permission.

On the feast of Saint Benedict I went to the shed for twine and found the watch had slipped from its nail and lay face up in the soil among the seedlings. Its hands had stopped at twenty past four. I picked it up meaning to hang it back, and then I did something I had not planned. I sat on the upturned bucket, prised the case open with my thumbnail, and let it run down while I watched the vine nudge another bud open against the grey stone. Nobody needed the hour from me that day. The bells rang without it.

When the bell for Vespers went, I walked to the wall. The flower had opened in the last of the sun. I left the watch on the windowsill with its key still hanging from the chain, and I went in to supper late for once.