Traditional colour tattoo of a pocket watch, a feather and a red rose with green leaves on the forearm, with script lettering below.

Pocket watch, feather and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pocket watch with a ring at the top sits behind a red rose with cream highlights, and a feather with red, orange and yellow tones rises from behind the watch. Dark green leaves fill the gaps, and black outlines define each element. Script lettering sits lower on the forearm, and the photo is taken at a close angle against a light blue cover.

Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Feather Rose Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch stopped at twenty to four on the morning the rain came down the cutting, and for nine days nobody in Marlow Cross would touch it. Hal Penrose kept it in the drawer of the signal box with the lever tallies and a chipped enamel mug, and he took it out only to look at the hands and put it back.

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Ada Fenn came up the wooden steps on the tenth day with a jay's feather pushed through her hatband and a bunch of red roses from the chapel wall. She said the watch was not broken, only waiting, and that she had heard it ticking in the box on evenings when Hal was down at the level crossing. Hal told her she was a fool. Then he took the watch out and held it to his ear, and he heard it too.

They sat up with it that night, the lamp turned low, the telegraph silent on its hook. Ada laid one rose on the sill beside the watch, and Hal told her about his father, who had carried the same watch through two wars and never once been late for a train. Near four o'clock the hands began to move. Hal did not say anything. He only wound it, slowly, the way his father had shown him, and let the second hand go round.

When the first grey light came over the points, Ada had gone home and the rose on the sill had opened into a full red bloom. Hal pinned the feather above the drawer where he could see it, and he never again let the watch run down.