Black ink line drawing of a pocket watch, two roses and leaves linked by a beaded chain, on cream paper beside two black pens.

Pocket watch, roses and chain line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn line design shows a pocket watch with a dotted rim and Roman numerals, set among two open roses, a rosebud and several leaves. A beaded chain loops around the composition and ends in a bar and ring clasp. The linework is clean and uniform in black ink with no shading, and the drawing sits on cream paper with two black pens at the lower left.

Traditional Pocket watch Rose Rosebud Leaves Chain Clock

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that curtain across, love, and mind the drip stand, it's older than both of us. You've time for a story before the ward round comes up from Harrow Bay. This one's about a watch and the roses that grew round it, and I'll tell it the way my nan told it to me, slow, because the night is long and nobody on this corridor is going anywhere.

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The watch belonged to a signalman called Walter Pyke, who worked a box at Thornley Junction in the years the trains still ran to the coast. He kept it on a chain across his waistcoat, a little silver thing with a dotted rim and numbers you could read from the crossing gate. Every night at ten past twelve he wound it, and every night the rose climbing his hut wall had put out another bud, as if it kept the same hours. His wife Edna grew that rose from a cutting. She said it bloomed twice a year out of spite, and she said the same of Walter.

The night the chain gave way, the watch slipped down the gap between the platform edge and the ballast. Walter lay flat on the boards with a hooked poker and a lamp, reaching until his cheek was full of grit. He found it at four in the morning, glass cracked, hands stopped at eleven minutes past twelve. He never had it mended. He walked it up the lane to Edna's door in his shirtsleeves and held it out on his open palm, and she studied those stopped hands a long while before she said, 'Then it's you that's been running late, Walter, not the rest of us.'

I've got that watch in my own pocket now, love, on a chain I made myself. Walter's granddaughter gave it me when I took this job, along with one rule: it gets wound at ten past twelve. Go on, the kettle's boiling, and that bed by the window has been ringing since you sat down.