Realistic black and grey tattoo of an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and engraved scrollwork on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with Roman numerals on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic pocket watch sits on the forearm, with its hinged loop at the top and Roman numerals around the dial. The engraved case shows swirling scrollwork, and soft grey shading gives the metal a rounded, three-dimensional form. The image is a close, straight-on view of the arm with the design filling most of the frame, and the ink is entirely black and grey.

Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Scrollwork Engraving

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Keep your hands off that paddle gear, Tilly, and sit where the cabin shadow falls, because this lock has a temper older than your nan and it won't wait on a story. Right. You want the watch. It belonged to Harold Pell, keeper of Stanwick Lock, and he wore it on a chain across his waistcoat the way a man wears a conscience.

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Every evening at six he wound it with a little silver key, held it up to the lamp and frowned at the scrollwork on the case, as if the swirls were a map of somewhere he'd lost. The canal company wanted the lock automated. Harold wouldn't have it. He said the boats came through on his time, and his time was in that watch.

One November a fog came down thick as wet wool, and at a quarter past six a narrowboat called the Clara Jane nosed out of the murk, her skipper bellowing that he was late for a funeral in Gloucester. Harold opened the case and saw the hands were four minutes slow. He had set them that way himself the year his wife Edith walked up the towpath to visit her sister and never walked back down it. Four minutes, he always said, was the gap she would have needed to step aboard, and he had never once let it close.

So he opened the gates a little late, as he always had, and let the Clara Jane through. When the skipper thanked him, Harold said nothing. He wound the watch, set it back against the bell and left the hands where they had been for twenty years. Now, Tilly, the rope. Pull.