Black and grey realism tattoo of an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and cogs on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with gears on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic pocket watch with exposed gears sits at the centre of the design, with its white dial, Roman numerals and hands clearly shown. Cogs and clock numerals fade into soft shading and large Roman numerals that extend beyond the watch across the forearm. The work uses black and grey ink only, with fine shading that gives the metal parts depth and a three-dimensional look.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Gear Cog Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Sallow Flat ran forty miles without a bend, and the only clock on it was the one Joseph Eames kept in his shop window. Everyone who came through bought their water from him and asked him the hour, because his pocket watch was never more than a minute wrong. He wound it each dawn with a key on a loop of brass wire and set it by the sun standing over the well.

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In the hot summer the well began to fall. Joseph counted the turns of the windlass and the grit in the bucket, and he watched the gears in his watch as if they might tell him something the water would not. A rider came in one evening with a bag of silver and asked to buy the watch. He said his mother had sent him to fetch it, and that she had owned it first, before the road was a road.

Joseph would not sell it. He opened the case and showed the rider the dial, the hands stopped at a quarter past four, and the cogs locked tight with dust. The rider looked at it a long while. Then he laid the silver on the counter, lifted the watch gently out of Joseph's palm, and set the hands going again with one turn of his thumb.

By morning the well had filled to the brim, and nobody in Sallow Flat could say where the water came from. Joseph still sets his watch by the sun, but he has never once asked the rider the hour, and he keeps the silver in a tin under the counter, untouched.