Black and grey pencil drawing of an ornate pocket watch design with a heart-shaped centre on the dial, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with heart-shaped face

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an ornate pocket watch with a ring bow, a crown and a scrolled, engraved case. The dial shows Arabic numerals around the edge and a rope-edged heart enclosing the hour and minute hands. The image is shaded in greys on a warm, sepia-toned paper background.

Realism Pocket watch Clock Heart Scrollwork Numeral Leaves

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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 watch is still ticking when the trawler clears the breakwater at Porthkell, though you have stopped trusting it. Your uncle Ned carried it for forty years, the silver case worn smooth where his thumb rested, and the rope-edged heart in the middle of its face was the only soft thing he ever owned. Skipper Hale says a man who checks his watch at sea is always late for something. You keep it buttoned inside your oilskin, against your ribs, and do not look at it again until the lamps of the fleet have thinned to pinpricks.

Keep reading

By the third hour the wind has backed north and the swell comes long and grey under the hull. Eleven boats were meant to hold station, but only seven still show light. You stand at the rail with the watch open in your palm and read the hands by the glow from the wheelhouse. Ned always said the short hand is for the sea and the long one is for home, and he never once said which of them he meant. The hour hand sits near the heart's left curve, the minute hand resting on the rope edge as if it has found something it wants to hold on to.

The gale arrives before the nets are full, hitting the boat broadside and throwing crates across the deck. Hale shouts for the lines. You are busy for what feels like minutes, and when you think to look again the glass has cracked across the twelve and both hands have stopped. It reads twenty to four. You try to remember whether that was the time you left the quay, or the time Ned stopped breathing in the back bedroom, and you cannot make the two memories sit apart.

Hale finds you at dawn, sitting on a coil of rope with the watch cupped in both hands. He does not ask the time. He turns the boat for home, and you let the stopped hands keep their small, certain shape while the harbour lights come up through the grey, one by one, the way they always have.