Black and grey realism tattoo of a cracked pocket watch with Roman numerals, held by a hand, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch held in a hand, realism

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and an exposed mechanism sits at the centre, its cracked glass rendered in fine detail. A hand with shaded fingers holds the watch from below, and a faint figure appears in the background at the top. The piece uses smooth black and grey shading with strong highlights on the metal casing.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Hand Gear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning the mate wound the watch in the lee of the galley, because the captain's hands shook too badly by then to do it himself. Gulls followed the ship out of Bristol and then stopped following, and the sea turned the colour of wet slate for nineteen days running.

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The watch had been his father's, a plain silver case with Roman numerals worn soft at the edges. On the twentieth night a sea came over the rail and the watch went skittering across the planks, and when the mate found it the glass had split in a star from the XII down to the III. The hands still moved. He held it up to the lantern and saw the wheels inside turning like small patient animals, and he decided that a thing which kept going after such a fall ought to be kept.

The captain never asked the time after that. He asked only whether the watch was still running, and the mate would say yes, and the captain would close his eyes. Off the Azores they lost the foresail and two men, and the fog came down thick enough to drink. The mate held the watch in his cupped palm at the bow, counting the strokes of the bell against it, and somewhere in the grey a lighthouse answered at the exact minute the little hand said it should.

Ashore they said the captain steered by a cracked watch and a dead man's luck. The mate never corrected them. He kept the watch wound, and the glass unmended, because the cracks were the chart he had sailed by.