Realism tattoo on the upper arm of a pocket watch with a gold movement, a feather, music staff lines and a compass rose, in black and grey with gold accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, feather and compass on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an open pocket watch with a detailed face and a gold mechanism visible through the case, set above a quill-like feather. Behind them are faint music staff lines and a compass with the letters N, E, S and W. The shading is soft and smoky, with strong contrast in the feather and watch case, and the gold tones are the only colour.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Feather Music note Compass Clock face

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

Mind the step, love, and don't touch the brass, it's older than the both of us. Right. The night the 7.40 came in three hours late, Harold Pym was up on the signal gantry at Carrow Junction with a lamp in his teeth, because the night man had gone home to his wife's funeral supper and somebody had to read the points.

Keep reading

Harold carried his father's pocket watch everywhere, the case dented where it had once rolled down a well, and he had a habit of winding it with his thumb whenever he was thinking. He wound it up there in the wind, and the gold wheels inside caught the lamplight like a fish turning under ice. Below him, in the waiting room, a young woman in a green coat was asking the porter which platform the London train would use, and the porter could only point at the old board where the compass was painted, the N gone soft with years of rain.

She had a letter in her hand, folded small and tucked with a sheet of music, and when she unfolded it on the bench the hand on the outside was Harold's own. He'd written it forty years back to a choirmaster in Leeds, asking him to come and play at the chapel the Sunday after the flood. He had never posted it. He'd pushed it into the pages of his father's copy of the hymns and forgotten it there, and the hymns had gone to a jumble sale in Ellesmere.

So Harold came down the ladder with the watch in one hand and the lamp in the other, and he gave her the only thing he had that was worth giving. He opened the case, held it to her ear, and let her hear the works going, steady as a heart that had waited a long time to be heard. Then the whistle went, and she was gone up the platform before he could tell her the letter was meant for someone who was already dead.