Black line drawing of a pocket watch surrounded by roses and a beaded chain, in a traditional style, shown as a tattoo design on a sepia textured background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with roses and beads

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an open pocket watch with its hands and dial visible, framed by full-blown roses and buds. A string of beads loops across the design and hangs from the top edge. The artwork uses bold, even linework with no shading, set against a sepia, textured background.

Traditional Pocket watch Rose Bud Bead Chain Clock hand Line drawing

Find an artist for this

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

Marguerite Hale had counted the bells of Corran Keep for eleven years, and in all that time the clock in the south tower had never once agreed with the sun. Her father had wound it every Sunday with a key the size of a herring, swearing it kept the true hour of the castle's dead lord. Now the keep was roofless, the stairs ended in air, and the only one left to wind anything was her.

Keep reading

On the morning the roses came through the chapel floor, she found the watch lying in the nettles below the arrow slit, its case cracked open and its hands stopped at a quarter to four. A string of jet beads was looped through the bow, the way her mother used to hang her rosary from a nail. Marguerite sat down in the wet grass and held it up to the light. The dial still had its tiny painted numerals, though the glass had gone milky.

She did not mend it. Instead she carried it up the spiral stair, past the place where a tread had fallen, and set it on the sill where the wind came through. She cut a rose from the climbing bush that had split the wall and laid it against the open face. Then she waited for the watch to tick, which it did not do, and for the castle to tell her what hour it was, which it also did not do.

At dusk the bells of the village church carried across the moor, late as always. She took the watch in both hands. For the first time she did not check it against anything. She tucked the rose behind the beads, climbed down, and left the hands exactly where they had stopped, because there was no one left to be late for.