Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a pocket watch with a bird in its face, yellow roses and leaves, and a red winged emblem, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, bird and roses on an arm

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits at the centre, with a small bird in flight within its face. Yellow and orange roses with green leaves frame the watch, and a red and brown feathered wing with a green emblem extends to the right. The linework is fine and dark, with the colour filled in and light shading across the feathers and petals, set against pale skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Other Pocket watch Bird Rose Leaves Wing Feather Roman numeral Clock Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty to four the winter my grandfather died, and it had stayed stopped through three house moves and one burst pipe. Mum wanted it polished for Priya's wedding, so I carried it to the shop on Dock Street where Mr Okafor kept his bench under a lamp shaped like a tulip.

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He opened the case with a thumbnail and peered in for a long time. "Nothing wrong with the movement," he said. "Something's roosting in it." Behind the Roman numerals, where the hands should have been, a small brown bird sat on the balance wheel with its wings folded tight as a letter. It had been there so long that it had worn a smooth dip in the enamel beneath it.

He wouldn't touch it. "Birds like a clock because it keeps time for them, and they don't like being told when to leave." So we took the watch out to the back step, loosened the bezel with a wooden spoon, and waited with a handful of yellow roses from the garden tucked into my cardigan pocket. The bird came out on the third try, shook itself twice, and flew straight at the sun above the bins, its red breast flaring like a coal someone had blown on.

At the wedding Priya wore the watch on a ribbon at her waist, its face empty of hands and full of light. When the registrar asked for the rings, a single feather drifted down from somewhere near the rafters and settled on her lace. Nobody else noticed. Mum says the bird was simply late, but I think it had been waiting for someone to ask it to leave.