Black line drawing of a traditional-style tattoo design with a pocket watch, an hourglass, three roses, a bird wing and a strand of beads on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, hourglass and roses line design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing on cream paper shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals, an hourglass wrapped in beads, three open roses and a bird wing. The linework is bold and even, with simple hatching and wood-grain detail on the hourglass caps. The composition is a dense, roughly symmetrical cluster of elements with leaves filling the gaps.

Traditional Pocket watch Hourglass Rose Bead Leaves Clock

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

Snow had sealed the Hollin Gate Inn since Tuesday, and Marjorie Venn had stopped pretending the post coach would come. The pocket watch on the bar ran eleven minutes slow, which her father would have called an insult to the mechanism. She wound it each morning out of habit, its brass case warm from her palm, while the taproom fire sank to a red crust.

Keep reading

The guests were stranded with her: a wool merchant with a cough, two sisters who argued over a hatbox, and a young surveyor named Tobias Quill who kept turning the hourglass on the mantel as if it might tell him something. Every time the sand ran out, someone said the snow had eased. Nobody believed it. Marjorie counted the grains that fell between one bell from the church and the next, a habit she had from her father.

On the third night the surveyor came to the kitchen with a folded map and a question about the old track over the ridge. She told him the track lay under twelve feet of drift and that the only road out was the thaw. He turned a scrap of paper in his fingers, folding it into the shape of a wing, and said his brother had crossed the ridge in a winter like this and sent word from the far side. Marjorie didn't ask how the word had come.

At dawn the snow stopped. She went out to the yard and found a trail already breaking through the blue light, a line of footprints climbing the slope, each one filling with fresh powder as she watched. Behind her the inn's windows glowed, and inside, she knew, the hourglass was turning again with no one left to watch it run out.