Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, two skulls and folded banknotes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch, skulls and banknotes on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm and shows a pocket watch with Roman numerals and visible hands at the centre, with a skull at the lower left and another partly visible at the upper left. Banknotes with the figure 100 sit behind and below the watch, with swirling smoke-like shapes above. The shading is grey and black with soft highlights, and the photograph is taken indoors against a dark floor.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Skull Banknote Roman numeral Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nessa Brand carried the pocket watch up fourteen flights of Calder House in her coat pocket, because the lift had been broken since March and she did not trust a bag. Her uncle Ray had left it to her with a note that said only, Don't let Dorrell touch it. She had no idea what that meant until she reached the landing and found the door of flat 14C open, a radio murmuring a cricket match nobody was listening to.

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Dorrell sat at a card table buried under envelopes, a cigarette burning down in a saucer beside him. Smoke hung under the ceiling in a slow grey loop. "Thought you'd come up with it," he said. "Your uncle owed me a hundred and twenty." He pushed a fan of notes across the table, the same sallow green as the ones printed on the watch's shadow. "Take that and the watch stays in your pocket."

Nessa looked at the money, then at the face she had pulled from her coat. Ten to four, both hands still. Ray had wound it every night at the kitchen sink, he said, so it would not forget how to run. She thought about the rent arrears, the bailiff's letter folded in her bag, and how the thing had kept ticking for forty years without anybody asking it to.

She slid the notes back across the baize. "He said you'd try to buy it," she said, "and I said you were just late." Then she wound the crown until it stiffened, set the watch face up beside the saucer, and let it tick. Dorrell's cigarette had gone out. For once the only thing in the flat that could be trusted to keep time was the one thing he had wanted to own.