Pencil sketch of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a looping chain, scrolls and two leaves, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with leaves and chain

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an open pocket watch with Roman numerals, hands and a looping chain that runs up through the bow and down the right side. Two leaves sprout from the edges of the watch, and curled scroll lines trail below it. The linework is fine and sketched, with light shading on the watch face and case and no colour.

Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Chain Leaves Scroll

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the part where the old clockmaker climbs the hill with his watch in his fist. He had been asked by the vintner's daughter to make her a clock that would stop at the exact moment the first leaf fell from the vine. She was a foolish girl, and he was a foolish man, so he agreed.

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He worked three winters on it. The case was beaten from copper, the face chalked with twelve Roman numerals because his master had taught him that numbers ought to be cut in the old way, and the chain he looped from the bow and let spill down the side like a green vine trailing a wall. When it was finished he carried it up the terraces, past the press houses and the sleeping dogs, and found the vine already bare except for three leaves clinging to its tips.

Here is the turn. He opened the case and the hands were already pointing at the hour the girl had named, yet the leaves did not fall. They waited, as leaves will for a man who has been patient, and the clockmaker understood that the watch had never been meant to measure the vine. It measured him, standing there with his cold fingers, and it had decided he had waited long enough.

He shut the case and went down the hill. The girl married a cooper that spring. The watch, they say, still ticks in the bottom of his chest, and the leaves on the old vine fall whenever it pleases them.