Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with two shaded roses, a Roman numeral pocket watch, a curling banner and a chain, in black and grey.

Pocket watch, roses and chain design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two shaded roses behind a open pocket watch with Roman numerals and hands, wrapped by a ribbon banner with a chain hanging below. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft graded pencil shading that gives the petals and watch case a three dimensional look. The design is entirely in greys on a pale sheet of paper, with the main elements arranged in a tall vertical composition.

Neo-trad Botanical Rose Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Banner Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock in the ward corridor had stopped at twenty to three, and nobody on nights would touch it, so we all just glanced at our own watches like sensible people. Old Mrs Tennant used to say the clock had seen off three matrons and a flood. Her version went that way every time, with the flood getting bigger.

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So here is what she told me the winter I was a student porter, sitting up with her on a night when the ambulances came in one after another. She said there was a porter before her called Walter Fenn, a steady man with a pocket watch on a chain that his mother had given him. He wound it every evening at the desk, the way other men say grace. When the hospital moved its clocks to the new digital boards, Walter kept his watch and kept the time by it, and nobody argued, because nobody liked to be the one to tell him he was wrong.

On the last night of his shifts, Walter came up the back stairs with two roses wrapped in newspaper, one for the sister on Ward Four and one for himself, though he never said which was which. He laid the roses on the desk and said the watch had run four minutes slow all its life and he was done apologising for it. Then he unhooked the chain, dropped the watch into the bin by the lift, and went home. Mrs Tennant said she fished it out before the cleaners came, and it was still ticking.

I asked her what time it was then. She looked at the old clock on the wall, which we had all agreed was wrong, and said, a few minutes past the time it claims, and that is near enough.