Realistic black and grey pocket watch tattoo with a colour bee and a grey butterfly on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with bee and butterfly on a leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A realistic pocket watch with Roman numerals and ornate hands fills the centre of the image, with its open stopwatch dial and crown shown in fine shading. A colour bee rests on the top edge of the watch, and a grey butterfly sits to the lower right, with faint partial tattoos visible at the edges of the frame. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft highlights on the glass and dial, and the photo is taken at a slight angle against a plain background.

Realism Calf Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Bee Butterfly

Find an artist for this

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

The bee came over the frontier before she did. It landed on the open lid of her grandfather's pocket watch while the officer at the barrier turned her passport over and over, as if the stamp might change its mind. Marta kept still. The watch had belonged to a railway signalman who kept the valley trains on time for forty years, and he had told her that a timepiece should never be hurried through a border, only waited with.

Keep reading

"Anything to declare?" the officer asked. "Only the time," she said, and opened the case so he could see the hands stood at ten to four, the hour her father had crossed the same bridge with a suitcase of honey and no papers at all. The bee walked along the rim, unbothered by the lamp. On the railing behind her a butterfly the colour of wet ash rested with its wings folded like a closed book.

The officer frowned at the watch, then at the bee. Regulations, he said, did not cover insects. Still, he lifted his stamp and hesitated. Marta reached over and touched the small dial at the bottom, where the seconds hand never quite caught up with the large one, and the ticking softened. "My grandfather said the trick was never to rush the hour," she said. "Only to let it arrive."

He stamped the page. The bee lifted off, crossed the barrier, and went down the far slope toward the orchards where the hives had waited all winter. The butterfly followed it a little way, then turned back toward the grey customs hut, as though the hut were owed a visit.