Pencil sketch design of a pocket watch, a rose, a key and a beaded chain, with handwritten lettering beneath, drawn on white paper.

Pocket watch, rose and key pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on white paper shows a pocket watch with its face and numerals, a shaded rose beside it, and a skeleton key at the bottom. A beaded chain loops from the watch to the key, and handwritten lettering sits between them. The shading is soft and grey, and the composition is centred on the page with the key placed lower down.

Pocket watch Clock Rose Key Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass was closed by four o'clock, and by six the snow had drifted to the height of the gatepost. Marjorie Pell stood at the desk of the Hollin Fell inn with the guest book open and a pencil behind her ear, counting the lit rooms. Only one key hung unclaimed on its brass hook, number nine, its bow worn smooth by a century of thumbs.

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The man who came in from the cold at seven had snow in his eyebrows and a pocket watch on a chain across his waistcoat. He asked for number nine without glancing at the board. Marjorie told him it had been shut since the war. He nodded as though she had confirmed something he already knew, then sat by the fire and set the watch on the table, face up. Its hands had stopped at twenty past twelve.

He said he had left that room on a Tuesday forty years ago, with a rose from the garden tucked in his buttonhole for a girl who never came down the stairs. He did not want to go up. He only wanted to sit where the clock in the hall could be heard, since that clock had kept his time.

Marjorie took the key up herself at midnight, a candle in a saucer. Number nine smelt of cold wax and pressed flowers. On the sill lay a letter in faded violet ink, the hand slanted and careful, folded around a dried rose. It read: I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then. Beneath it someone had scratched a date into the wood with a nail.

When she came back down, the watch was ticking on the table. The man had left his coat on the chair and was standing in the doorway, looking at the snow. She laid the key beside the watch. In the morning the drifts had covered the lane, the coat was still on the chair, and the watch had been wound, its hands moving on as if they had never stopped.