Black line drawing of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a ring bow and exposed gears on the dial, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with visible gears line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A pocket watch with a ring bow and a double-ringed case, shown in a black outline drawing. The dial has Roman numerals around the edge, and the centre is cut away to reveal interlocking gears and a hour and minute hand. The linework is uniform and bold, with no shading or colour.

Pocket watch Clock Gear Roman numeral Hand

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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

The pickers were due at seven, and at a quarter past Nell still had the ladder propped against the wrong tree. She stood under the Bramleys with the watch open in her palm, the cut-away dial letting the gears show through like the workings of some patient beetle, and listened for the sound that had once told her grandfather the fruit was ready: a single apple letting go of its stalk and landing in the long grass.

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He had timed the whole harvest by that watch. Every August he walked the rows of Hollin Orchard with it hooked to his waistcoat, and when the windfalls began to thud he would stop, check the minute hand, and write a figure in the ledger that lived in the tack room. Forty years of figures. The ledger was the only thing he left her that she could not sell, and she had never once understood it.

The watch had stopped on Tuesday. She had wound it three times, shaken it, held it to her ear the way he used to, and the wheels turned only as far as a sigh before going still. Somewhere over the wall a tractor started. The pickers' van came up the lane with dust hanging behind it, and she heard the first apple of the morning drop, soft and certain, into the grass.

She did not mend the watch. She opened the ledger at the next blank line, wrote the time as the sun told it to her, and underlined it twice. Then she pressed the stem until the hands jumped to match, closed the case with its double ring, and went down the row to meet them.