Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with an open pocket watch, a lily, a beaded chain, bee and scrollwork, with script lettering on the watch lid.

Pocket watch, lily and beaded chain design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an open pocket watch with a lily, a beaded chain and a bee, framed by ornate scrollwork. The lid carries three lines of script lettering, and the watch face is shaded with fine hatching. The design is shown in greys on a pale background, with the elements arranged in a loose diagonal composition.

Botanical Realism Pocket watch Lily Bead Chain Bee Scrollwork Lettering Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats came in on the turn of the tide, and Old Hesketh would not go down to the quay until his watch told him so. It was a silver thing with a lid that opened like a shell, and inside the lid a sprig of lily had been pressed flat so long it had gone the colour of weak tea. Nobody in Brackwater could say who had made it. The bees that worked the cliff gardens above the harbour seemed to know its hours better than the church bell did.

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One November the watch stopped at ten minutes past four, the hour the fleet had gone out and never come back. Hesketh wound it, shook it, held it to his ear like a man listening at a door. Nothing. His daughter Maud, who was nine and did not believe in anything she could not put in a jar, said the bee on the lid was only asleep and that was all. She took the watch up the cliff path in her pinafore pocket and sat with it among the late hives until a bee came down and walked round the rim of the case, slow as a sexton, and the minute hand gave a small shiver and moved.

Hesketh said nothing when she came home. He only lifted the lid and read the names cut beneath the lily, the names of men he had sailed with, and then he went down to the quay and waited. The boats came in at dusk, all eleven, and they came in on the minute.