Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of an open pocket watch with Roman numerals on a forearm, surrounded by splashes of blue, orange, green and yellow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watch with watercolour splashes on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an open pocket watch with Roman numerals on its face, a stopped chain and a small crown, with loose numerals and marks scattered above and below it. The watch is drawn with dark linework and grey shading, while the background is filled with loose splashes of blue, red, orange, green and yellow. The design is centred on the forearm, with the watch face as the clear focal point.

Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Watercolour splash Number Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The numerals had come off the station clock in the night, all but the twelve, and when Ruth Pennock came down Linthwaite platform at seven she found them scattered across the wet boards like dropped teeth. Somebody had to put them back before the eight-fifteen. The stationmaster, Arthur Dunne, was already on the bench with his own watch open on his knee, the silver lid lying flat as a plate, and he was not looking at the clock at all.

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"It stopped at twenty past," he said. "Same as my father's did the week he went." He held the watch out so she could see the hands, the Roman numerals worn to ghosts around the rim, and the chain hanging loose where the bolt had sheared. "I wound it every morning for thirty-one years. Last Tuesday I forgot."

Ruth had a tin of enamel paints from the signwriter's shop over the bridge, where her uncle had taught her to letter shop fronts, and she had been told she had a steady hand. She knelt on the platform, gathered the figures into her apron, and began painting them back onto the iron rim in red and blue, the colours running into each other where the damp had softened the enamel. The numerals came out bright and a little wild, nothing like the printed face of the clock. Arthur watched her and said nothing, which she took as permission.

When the train was signalled round the bend, she pressed the last figure into place, a crooked IX that bled green at its edges, and handed the dead watch back. Arthur turned the winding key once, then again, and the second hand jerked forward as though it had only been waiting to be asked. Behind them the station clock still read twenty past, but neither of them looked up at it.