Black and grey pencil drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, flanked by two roses and strands of pearls, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with roses and pearl chains

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals and an ornate central dial, hung from a loop with a crown at the top. Two large roses with layered petals sit on either side of the watch, with strings of pearls curving above and below it. The linework is dark and crisp, with soft grey pencil shading on the watch face, petals and leaves against a plain pale background.

Neo-trad Pocket watch Clock Rose Pearl Bead Roman numeral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coach from Brig is late again, and you know before its wheels crest the rise because the wind has dropped the way it does before snow. You put down the bread knife and lift your father's watch from its nail behind the counter. It is the only clock in the Hospiz that keeps the hour properly, and the travellers, stiff and sour from the climb, always ask you to set their own by it.

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The case lid carries two roses that a Milan enameller painted the year before he drowned in the Toce. The chain is strung with pearls that the widow Anneliese from the lower valley traded for a winter's firewood. She came back in April to ask for them, and your father gave them back without a word, which you have never forgiven him for and never understood. You wind the crown three turns and feel the mainspring take up its tension against your thumb.

A surveyor arrives with frost in his moustache and asks to borrow the watch to time the avalanche bells across the gorge. You give it to him. He returns it at dusk with the glass cracked and a dried rose petal caught under the lid, and he says the watch has been running four minutes fast every day since he first saw it on the counter. He asks whether you knew.

You did not, not until now. You open the case, find the tiny screw under the roses, and turn the hand back four minutes. Outside the snow thickens, the last coach idles at the barrier, and the bells ring once across the dark, exactly on time.