Black and grey realism sleeve with a pocket watch and roses on the left arm, and script lettering across the ribs of a woman in a black bikini.

Pocket watch sleeve and script lettering on torso

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black bikini is shown from the chest to the thigh, with her left arm raised. A black and grey sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm, featuring a pocket watch on a chain, roses and shaded detail. Across the abdomen sits a flowing script lettering tattoo in dark ink on a lightly lit, plain background.

Lettering Realism Upper arm Forearm Ribs Pocket watch Chain Rose Script lettering Sleeve Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's gone low and this part wants telling quiet. Forty-one days out of Valparaiso, the Mercy Ann was running before a wind that never once let up, and the second mate, a Yorkshireman called Tobias Crane, wound his father's silver pocket watch every night at eight bells, the way his father had done on the Dundee whalers. Nobody aboard thought the habit strange until the watch stopped at a quarter past three on the morning we raised the Horn.

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Crane swore the glass had not cracked and the works were clean. He sat on the hatch cover with the watch open on his knee and tipped it to the lamp, and that's when the boy saw the rose pressed flat inside the lid, brown at the edges, and a line of copperplate scratched beneath it: she would stand at the rail until the lamps went out. Nobody knew who she was. Crane had never married, and he'd never once said a name at the table.

The men argued all week over whether the watch had been wound for a woman or for the sea, and Crane settled it himself at dawn on the seventh day. He held the watch up to the rising sun, let the hands sit where they had stopped, and said the time was the time she had asked him to keep. Then he dropped it over the side on its chain, and the rose went down with it into water the colour of slate.

Some nights, if the wind drops and the bell is quiet, I still hear that chain running out through the rail. The watch was never wound again. It was the only thing aboard that ever knew exactly when we were.