Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch held in a hand

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic tattoo shows an open pocket watch with a cracked glass face, Roman numerals and exposed gears at its centre, held between two fingers. The shading is soft and detailed, with strong highlights on the metal case and a smoky grey background that fades into the skin. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed close, with the watch filling most of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock face Roman numeral Gear Hand

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

The glass cracked the winter the cold frame collapsed, and by the time you dug the watch out from under the damson tree it had stopped at twenty to four. You rub the dirt from the case with your thumb. Beneath the split glass the Roman numerals still run round the face, XII at the top and VI faint at the bottom, and the gears sit open at the centre like something the blackbirds have been picking at. Your grandmother used to hold it exactly like that, pinched between finger and thumb, while she decided whether the beans could go in or the frost was still lying in the low corner by the water butt.

Keep reading

You take it to the clockmaker in Hebden because you cannot think what else to do with it. He screws a loupe into his eye and turns the movement under the lamp for a long time. The mainspring is fine, he says. Nothing inside has rusted through. The damage is only the glass and a little grit that got in where the back did not quite shut. Wind it, and it will go again. He says this as though it is good news, and you nod, and you do not tell him that she wound it every night at nine, after the kettle, before the news.

You carry it home in your coat pocket, where it knocks against your hip with every step up the lane. In the garden the damson is heavy with first blossom and the cold frame is still a heap of splintered wood. You kneel by the tree and dig a hand's depth beside the old hole. You set the watch face up in the soil, the hands still pointing at twenty to four, and you press the earth down over the back of it. The clockmaker can have his winding. Some hours are better kept where the roots can find them.