Realistic coloured tattoo on a forearm showing a pocket watch with visible gears, a red rose and two butterflies.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, rose and butterflies on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and brass gears, with a blue butterfly above and a purple butterfly below. A shaded red rose and a string of pearl-like beads sit at the lower edge, and a vintage key is partly visible at the top. Soft shading gives the metal and petals depth, and the arm is photographed against a speckled grey floor with a patterned top and denim partly visible at the right.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Gear Roman numeral Butterfly Rose Key Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire only warms the side of you that faces it. Brother Anselm kept the clocks of this valley for forty winters, and on the morning the novice Tomas came up the hill with a dead woman's watch in his fist, the old man was already halfway through a sermon on patience to a wall of cogs.

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The watch was brass worn soft at the edges, its face painted with Roman numerals that had faded to the colour of weak tea. Inside, the little wheels still turned when you tipped them, though nobody had wound it since the autumn Marguerite Vallon was carried down to the chapel. Tomas had found it on her windowsill beside a key on a faded ribbon, and a rose pressed flat inside a letter addressed to nobody at all.

Anselm turned the key over in his palm and read the words scratched beneath the back plate: wind me when the blue ones come to the wall. So the boy waited with him through the cold months, and when May came and the abbey garden went green, the old monk carried the watch out to the rose bush against the south wall at noon. Nothing happened for a long while. Then a blue butterfly lit on the stone, and a purple one after it, and Anselm wound the key until his fingers ached.

The gears caught with a sound like a held breath let go. Tomas asked him what time it was, and Anselm only smiled into his beard. Whatever hour it is, he said, when something you were waiting for finally arrives. Then he pressed the watch into the boy's hand and told him it had never once been wrong, only patient.