Black and grey realism tattoo of an ornate pocket watch with a shaded dial and swirling smoke on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed pocket watch with a bow, engraved case and shaded dial sits on the forearm, with its face showing decorative filigree and dark hour markers. Smooth grey shading gives the watch a metallic, three-dimensional look against softer smoke-like shadows that wrap around the arm. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the healed or fresh piece against a white paper background.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Filigree Smoke Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and stop fidgeting with that cup, because I am coming to the watch now and it deserves your attention. My grandmother's cousin Tomas kept the ferry clock on Scarra for forty-one years, and when the mainland men came to take the old bell down, he went round to them with his silver pocket watch in his fist and said the bell could go when the tide stopped. They laughed. The tide has never stopped, and neither has he, not yet, not properly.

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The watch had come off a drowned sailor from the Lerwick boat, a man called Aldous Petrie who was never found. It had a bow shaped like a little curl of rope and a case engraved all round with fern and fish-scale, and inside, the face was black with age, the numerals worn to dark nubs and a dial of curling leaves like frost on a window. Tomas wound it every night at nine. He said the sea got into everything except the mechanism, and the mechanism only kept good time when a man was honest with it.

One February the smoke came off the water in long grey ropes, so thick you could not see the lighthouse from the pier. Tomas walked out into it with the watch open in his palm. The hands had stopped at a quarter past four, the hour Petrie's boat was lost. He held it up and said, quite plainly, "You can have the hour back if you give me the boy." Nobody on Scarra ever learned which boy he meant.

The fog lifted before dawn. Tomas was sitting on the slipway, dry as a bone, and the watch was ticking. Some say he never told anyone what he bargained for. I say he sold nothing, and that the old bell still rings at quarter past four, for those who know to listen.