Pencil flash drawing of a shaded pocket watch wrapped in chain with a key and scrolling ornament, with no body placement shown.

Pocket watch, chain and key design

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and clock hands, crossed by a looping chain that ends in a key. Baroque-style scrollwork fills the background above and below the watch. The work is in graphite greys with soft shading and fine hatching on the case and chain, and the sheet is shown as a single centred composition.

Pocket watch Chain Key Scrollwork Roman numeral Clock hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pyle left me his watch and a key, and a rule that the 6.40 must never leave Thornbeck Junction early. I was twenty-three, a porter with oil under my nails, and nobody had ever trusted me with anything that ticked. The watch was heavy as a bread roll, its silver case worn to brass where a thumb had pressed it for forty years. The chain ran from the bow to a hook on his waistcoat, and the little key hung from the end of it, the one for the timetable cabinet in the signal box.

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"Keep it wound and keep it honest," he said the morning he went into hospital. "The men will set their watches by you. The weather will set itself by nobody."

The first hard winter, the cold stopped the watch at ten past six on a Tuesday. I did not tell anyone. I stood on the platform with it pressed to my ear, listening to nothing, while the 6.40 came in a full minute late, the first time in four decades a train had run late on my account. Mrs Okonedo from the ticket office found me there and tapped the glass with her fingernail. She said the oil had thickened in the frost and that a watch was only a small animal that needed warming. I carried it in my inside pocket for three days, against my ribs, and on the fourth morning it began again, stubborn and bright.

I still open the cabinet every dawn with that key, though nothing inside has changed in years. Last week a girl from the lamp room asked me the time, and I showed her how to hold the crown between finger and thumb and turn it slowly, the way you would turn a page you did not want to tear. The key I kept on the chain. It still fits the lock, and somebody has to check.