Pencil design sketch of a pocket watch with roman numerals, wrapped in shaded leaves and a small eye, drawn on torn paper.

Pocket watch with leaves and roman numerals

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an ornate pocket watch with roman numerals, ornamental casing and a decorative chain at the top. Leaves and a flower-like form with a single eye curl around the left side of the watch face. The linework is detailed, with soft graded shading on the foliage and the case, and the drawing is on a torn, cream-coloured sheet against a dark purple cloth.

Botanical Realism Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Leaves Flower Eye Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, my love, and mind the draught from the back door, because this is a story that wants a warm room. Mrs Pennock kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps for forty years, and the first thing she told every new lodger was that the hall clock ran four minutes slow and the pocket watch never lied. Hold on to that, because the whole tale hangs on it like washing on a line.

Keep reading

The watch belonged to a lodger called Amos Tremayne, who came off the Penzance train in March with one brown trunk and a case of silver worked all over with bramble leaves. Pressed into the lid was a flower with a single eye at its heart, and Amos swore the eye followed you round the room. Every night he wound the watch on the third stair, counting the turns under his breath, and every morning he set it by the signal flag on the harbour wall, which was the only true time in Cornwall.

Then came the November gale. The lifeboat went out at dusk for the Mary Ellen and did not come back by midnight. Amos sat in the front parlour with the watch open on his knee, and at ten past eleven the hands stopped dead. He tapped the glass, he breathed on it, he held it to the lamp. 'Not yet,' he said, to nobody, and he set the watch on the windowsill facing the harbour and left it there. The boat came in at dawn with all hands, and Amos never wound that watch again.

I have it still, on the sill where he left it, its leaves gone green with salt and its eye fixed on the water. Every morning I dust the glass and say good morning to the flower, and every morning the hands sit at ten past eleven, waiting for somebody to walk up the lane. Mind you don't tap it, now. Some things are only kept by leaving them alone.