Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch, hanging key and rose on a forearm.

Pocket watch, key and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed pocket watch with Roman numerals and an ornate engraved case sits above a skeleton key hanging from a chain and a large rose at the base. The shading is smooth and tonal, with soft grey highlights on the petals and fine wisps of smoke or feather-like forms behind the watch. The design is done entirely in black and grey ink and fills the frame down the forearm.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Key Rose Feather Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ashdown wanted the east border cut back before the first frost, so I was on my knees in the leaf mould when my trowel knocked against something that rang. It was a pocket watch, its silver case gone the colour of wet slate, its chain tangled round a skeleton key as long as my hand. Nobody had wound it in years. The hands stood at eleven minutes past four.

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Edith, the head gardener's wife, took one look at the key and said the house had never had a door it fitted. She said the rose beside it was the old Albertine her husband planted the spring they married, and that he had always meant to dig it up and never did. I asked where the door might be. She shrugged and told me to mind the thorns.

I spent that week trying the key on every lock in the stables, the potting shed and the cold frame. Nothing turned. On Thursday I wound the watch, half as a joke, and the hands jumped to ten to five and began to move properly, ticking loud against my ear like a small impatient animal. I sat back on my heels with the key in one hand and the watch in the other until my knees ached through the sacking.

The key fitted the hollow stump of the old sundial, which I had walked past for twenty years. Inside was a tin box of letters, all addressed to Edith in a hand I did not know, each one dated the same week of a different year. I put the watch back on its chain and left it on the sundial. Mr Ashdown never asked about the roses, and I never cut that one back.