Black and grey realism tattoo of two pocket watches with a butterfly and flowers on a lower leg.

Pocket watches and butterfly on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two overlapping pocket watches with Roman numerals and fine case detail, framed by a butterfly, tulip-like blooms, a rose and curled scrollwork. The shading is soft and graded, with strong highlights on the watch cases and a dark, dense shadow along the lower edges. The design is black and grey, and it fills the frame vertically across the leg.

Realism Calf Pocket watch Clock Butterfly Rose Tulip Flower Scroll Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy Marr had been winding the two watches on the kitchen windowsill for eleven years, though neither had kept true time since the winter the hallway clock cracked. On the first warm Sunday of April she carried them out to the back border in a biscuit tin, past the tulips she had forced under glass, and set the tin on an upturned bucket beside the rose.

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Her son Dan had wanted them sold. The jeweller in Kendal had offered forty pounds for the pair and a kind look that she resented more than the price. Ivy had said nothing to him about the third watch, the one that had been her father's, which she had never once opened. She lifted the lid of the tin now. The silver was tarnished grey at the edges, the glass on the larger face bloomed with a crack like a frozen stream, and both hands had stopped at twenty to four.

She dug a hole beside the tulips with the trowel her husband had bought from a catalogue in 1979 and never used properly. The soil smelled of rain and rot. She laid the first watch face up, then the second, and a red admiral settled on the rim of the tin as if it were a bloom that had come up early. It opened and closed its wings slowly, and for a moment the light caught the dust on them.

Ivy filled the hole and patted the earth flat. Then she wound her father's watch, which had not run in decades, and held it to her ear. Nothing. She laughed, a short surprised sound, and set it on the soil between the roses so the sun would reach its face. Whatever hour it showed now, the bees kept their own.