Coloured pencil sketch of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a looping ribbon and a flower with leaves, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with ribbon and flower sketch

Colour · Flash

The drawing shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and hands, a looped ribbon wrapping around its bow and trailing below, and a flower with petals and leaves beneath the watch. The outlines are in dark graphite with loose, sketched shading, and the ribbon and watch case are washed with yellow and orange pencil. Touches of blue, green and red colour the flower and background on a cream paper.

Pocket watch Clock face Roman numeral Ribbon Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch came to me on the morning the old cellarer died, wrapped in a strip of blue ribbon that had once marked the Psalter at Compline. Brother Osric had wound it every night for forty-one years, and nobody else was permitted to touch the little silver key. I was seventeen, eleven weeks into the novitiate, and I held it as though it might tick its way out of my hand.

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I did not wind it that first night. I laid it on the sill of my cell and listened to the bell ring Matins, then Lauds, and felt the watch sitting there like a reproach. On the third morning its hands had stopped at a quarter past four. I took it down to the garden and found Brother Peregrine kneeling in the rose beds, pinching back suckers with his thumbnail.

"He never let the roses go to seed," Peregrine said, without looking up. "Said a watch should not outlast the thing it measures."

I opened the case the way I had seen Osric do. Inside the lid was a pressed rose, brown at the edges, and tucked beneath the dial was a folded slip listing the day of first flowering for each bed since 1961, in his tidy hand. The last entry was blank. I wound the watch that evening, very gently, and it began again with a sound like someone breathing through their teeth. In the morning I wrote the date beside the empty line, then tied the blue ribbon round the nearest bush so the bell-ringer would know which one to watch.