Black and grey realism tattoo of a pocket watch, rose and daisies with a Mama banner, on the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, rose and daisies with Mama banner

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits at the centre, with a rose behind its top and two daisies to the right. A banner reading Mama curls beneath the watch and another ribbon loops up on the left. The tattoo uses black and grey shading with soft tonal gradients, and the photograph shows it from a close angle with a striped red and white top covering part of the skin.

Realism Ribs Pocket watch Roman numeral Rose Daisy Banner Clock Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty past four again, so Ada Mercer carried it out to the orchard in her apron pocket and sat on the wall to listen for its last few ticks. Her son Eli was up the ladder in the old russet trees, shaking windfalls into a sack and counting them aloud, the way he counted everything, as though numbers might keep him from falling.

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Her father had made the watch in a village where clocks were sold by weight. He gave it to her with one rule: never let the hands pass the XII on a Sunday, or the day would come back looking for you. She had laughed at him then. She did not laugh now, with the daisies going brown at the edges of the field and the rose on the garden wall dropping its last petals onto the path.

The stranger came at the hour the bees went quiet. He wore a grey coat and carried a case of small brass tools, and he asked what she would pay to have the watch run true again. Ada said she had nothing but an orchard and a boy. He looked up at the child in the branches for a long moment, then took the watch from her palm and turned it over. "Then I will take the hours you have left over," he said, "and leave you the ones you need." He wound the crown once, and the second hand jumped and began to run.

Eli came down with bruised apples in his shirt and found his mother sitting very still in the grass with the case open on her knee. The hands read twenty past four, but the second hand was moving. Inside the lid someone had scratched a small banner, and beneath it was his own name, and beside that the word Mama. "Where did you get that?" he asked. She closed the lid, handed him the sweetest apple from the sack, and said only that it was keeping time now.