Three photographs of pocket watch tattoos on forearms: a realistic black and grey watch with a bee, a traditional watch with a red rose, and a coloured watch with a cracked dial.

Pocket watch tattoos on forearms, three examples

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows three photographs of pocket watch tattoos on forearms. The left example is a realistic black and grey watch with Roman numerals, a bee resting on the case and a faint butterfly beside it. The centre example pairs a gold-cased watch with a large red rose and green leaves in bold outlines, while the right example is a coloured, shaded watch with a cracked dial set against a blurred background.

Realism Traditional Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Bee Butterfly Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter in Marrowfield had been told since birth that time was a debt, and that every hour borrowed had to be paid back in honey. So when the old watch stopped at a quarter to twelve on the morning of the summer fair, nobody in the village thought to be frightened, only annoyed. The bee came down onto the case while Tamsin Reeve was still winding it, and she let it stay, because the thing was clearly warm and the bee was clearly tired.

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Her father had made the watch for the Duke's steward, who never paid for it. It had sat in a drawer for thirty years with its silver lid shut tight. Tamsin prised the lid open with a hairpin and found the dial cracked straight across the middle, a fault line running from the sixth numeral to the twelfth, and the hands sitting still at the crack as if they had been waiting for someone to notice.

She took it up the hill to the Duke's house herself. The steward was dead. The Duke was asleep in a chair with a moth on his sleeve. She set the watch on the table beside him and wound the crown one more time, slowly, the way her father had taught her, and the second hand began to walk. Behind her the bee lifted off the case and drifted out through the open window towards the orchard, where the bells of the village were ringing noon a little late, and nobody, that day, asked her for a receipt.