Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a key and a rose on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, key and rose on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits above an ornate key and a shaded rose, with wispy feather or smoke shapes filling the background. The work uses fine black and grey shading to build soft highlights and depth across the metal, petals and fabric-like details. The tattoo runs vertically along the arm and fills most of the frame against a blurred, dark background.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Key Rose Feather Smoke

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 clock in the back parlour of the Hollin Fell inn had stopped at a quarter past four, and nobody in the village would say who had stopped it. Ada Brennan wound it every Sunday regardless, because her mother had, and because the snow outside the shutters had been falling for three days and the road to Kendal was a white wall nobody would drive through.

Keep reading

On the fourth night a traveller came in out of the drift carrying a key wrapped in oilcloth. He wanted a room, and he wanted the back parlour, and he paid in coins so old the head on them had worn to a smudge. He sat by the grate and turned the key over and over in his fingers while the feathers of frost crept up the inside of the window glass, and he told her the key belonged to a house on the north shore that had been locked since before the war, with a rose trained over its door that nobody had pruned in fifty years.

Ada did not ask what was in the house. She only said the watch on the mantel had not run in her lifetime, and he laughed, a dry sound, and said that was the trouble with watches. They only kept time for the one who was still counting.

In the morning the road was clear and the parlour was empty. The coins were gone. On the mantel, beside the stopped clock, lay a single dried rose petal and a key-shaped dent in the dust, and when Ada lifted the clock's brass case to wind it, the hands had moved on to a quarter past five.