Black and grey realism tattoo of an open pocket watch with a spiral clock face, leaves and a bead chain, on the upper arm.

Pocket watch with spiral clock face

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded pocket watch sits at the centre of the design, with its crown and bow at the top and a spiral of clock numbers receding into the dial. Fine leaves and a chain of beads wrap around the watch, with soft grey shading giving the case and face a three-dimensional look. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink on smooth skin, filling most of the frame against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Clock Spiral Leaves Bead Chain Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, and mind the stove, for this is a tale about Mabel Thorne and the watch her father left her on the Lark, the narrowboat that crept up the Kennet with coal and cabbages until the canal gave out at Hungerford. Her father had carried that pocket watch through forty years of lock-keeping, and when the lockhouse flooded he came back for nothing but the watch and a tin of tea. The numbers on its face had worn so pale that Mabel swore they went round in a spiral, one hour folding into the next, and she would not let anyone set it right.

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The trouble began in the November the ice came early. The Lark was frozen to the towpath, and a man in a good coat came down from London asking after a barge that had sunk in 1911 with a cargo of brass fittings. He had the same watch as Mabel, or near enough, the same crown and the same chain of little beads, and he said it had stopped at twenty to four on the night she went down. Mabel told him the watch kept its own time and she would thank him to take his questions up the towpath.

He came back the next morning anyway, and that was when she noticed the leaves on his cuff matched the leaves engraved round her own case, curling in toward the centre as if the whole canal were winding itself down a drain. She took her father's watch out and wound it slowly, counting the turns under her breath, until the spiral of numbers reached the middle and stopped. The man went very quiet. Then he laughed, took his hat off, and said that was the time he had been waiting thirty years to hear.

They never did find the brass. Mabel still runs the Lark, and she still will not let anyone set the watch.