Black and grey realism tattoo on the side of the ribs showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, feathers and an ornate key.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, feathers and key on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a visible hand at its centre, surrounded by several detailed feathers. An ornate key hangs from a ring below the watch, with a further feather curling beneath it. The work uses fine shading and soft gradients in black and grey ink across the whole composition.

Realism Ribs Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Feather Key

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Thursday the cage came up from the Deep Pit with a little less of the valley in it, and every Thursday Nell Maddern wound her husband's pocket watch and set it beside the kettle. Harry had carried it down for twenty years and it had never once run slow. The night of the fall it stopped at ten past four, and no amount of shaking would start it again. She kept it on the windowsill with the Roman numerals turned to the room, the way he had liked to check the hour from his chair.

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The stranger came in March, when the rain blew sideways over the spoil heaps. He wore a long dark coat and had a small iron key on a ribbon at his throat, and he said he could open any lock in the valley. Nell said there was nothing in her house that needed opening. He looked at the windowsill, then at the grey pigeon quills she had been gathering from the loft, and he said every house in the valley had one room its people could not walk past.

He would trade her a morning, he said, the one before the cage went down, if she would give him the watch. Nell asked what the watch was worth to a man like that. He said it had counted the hours for every shift that ever went under, and a thing that kept such count was owed a rest. She thought of Harry's thumb rubbing the worn gold case. She gave him the quills instead, a fistful of them, and told him the watch was not for sale.

The stranger laughed and left the key on the step. That night the watch began to tick, though nobody had wound it, and in the morning a single feather lay on the sill, curled like a question, with the hour hand pointing at four.