Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a pocket watch, a swallow, a flower and a banner with script lettering, in a traditional style.

Pocket watch, swallow and banner sketch

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on textured paper of a pocket watch with Roman numeral markings and an ornate outline. A swallow sits above it, a flower sits below, and a ribbon banner across the lower half carries script lettering that reads "old time" and a longer word in flowing handwriting. The linework is fine and sketchy, with light shading and no colour.

Traditional Pocket watch Swallow Flower Banner Script Clock Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Tully had been told the watch would never run again, so she was not expecting the tick. It came from the dish on the washstand at a quarter past four, when the snow had been falling on the Dale Road for two days and the inn's lamps had burned down to their last inch. She lifted the watch to the candle. It was her father's, the brass gone soft at the edges, the glass cracked across the six. Its hands had stood at twenty to four since 1947.

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Downstairs, in the back parlour, Walter kept a shoebox of drawings that guests had left in payment for their rooms. She knew the grey sheet before she unfolded it: a pocket watch with its Roman numerals ringed in pencil, a swallow dropping out of the snow above it, a flower pinned below like a brooch. A ribbon ran across the bottom, and on it, in looping script, the words old time and a longer word that trailed off into a loose, unfinished tail. The shoebox also held a receipt for a second-floor room, dated October. The stranger who had signed it had never come back for either.

She carried the sheet across the lane to the watchmaker's cottage, where Ezra Moss had been snowed in with a broken regulator for a week. He bent over the drawing with his loupe and said the watch was not broken at all. Someone had set it an hour fast, then stopped the balance with a hair so it would wait. 'It has been keeping a different hour,' he said. 'Somebody wanted it ready for a different morning.'

They sat until the window turned from black to pewter. Margaret eased the hour hand back to the true time and let the balance go. The tick ran steady across the table. Outside, the road showed through the drifts, and down in the hall the inn's old clock struck seven, a beat behind her own.