Black and grey realistic tattoo design drawing of a pocket watch, compass and two roses on a chain, with a banner reading Not all those who wander are lost.

Pocket watch, compass and roses design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A greyscale drawing of a tattoo design showing an open pocket watch with Roman numerals on a chain, a compass rose with roses in front of it, and a ribbon banner carrying the words Not all those... who wander... are lost. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft highlights on the petals and metal. The elements are arranged in a vertical composition on a plain white background, with the chain winding down from the watch to the bottom of the banner.

Realism Pocket watch Compass Rose Chain Banner Quote Clock Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Haddow had pawned the watch twice before the ship came in, and both times Mr Ogden at the counter on Scale Lane had handed it back with the patience of a man who knew it would return. This third time he turned it over under his lamp, found the engraving inside the case, and said nothing for so long that she counted the ticks of the clock above the door. Forty-one. Then he asked where she had got it.

Keep reading

From her brother Tom, who had worn it on a chain since he was fourteen and left it on the hall table the morning he signed on for the Mary Adair. The compass had gone in the spring, sold to a man from Grimsby who swore it still pointed north. The roses had been their mother's, pressed in a hymnal until the petals went the colour of tea. The ribbon was Tom's joke, a line he had read aloud on the quay until the other lads groaned.

Ogden opened the back with his thumbnail. Scratched into the metal, in a hand Nell did not recognise, were two lines of figures and a date from March. Beneath them, smaller, was a word that was not a place. She had never seen it. Tom never let anyone hold the watch long enough to look. Ogden said the figures were coordinates for a bay off the Norwegian coast where a trawler had gone down, and that his cousin crewed the Humber lifeboat and might know the rocks.

She did not pawn the watch that day. She walked down to the harbour with the chain looped twice round her wrist, and found the lifeboat man mending net on the steps. When he saw the case in her palm he took off his cap without being asked. She wound the watch there on the wet stone, and it began to tick, keeping time for nobody but her.