Black and grey forearm tattoo of two pocket watches on a chain above two shaded roses with leaves and a small flower below, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pocket watches and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two pocket watches hang on a looped chain at the top of the design, with their Roman numeral faces and hands clearly drawn. Two shaded roses with leaves sit beneath and beside the watches, with a small outlined flower at the bottom. The work is in black and grey, with smooth gradient shading on the petals and watch cases, and the photo shows three views of the same forearm piece.

Traditional Realism Forearm Pocket watch Clock Rose Chain Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 2.40 a.m. Ward 9 has gone quiet in the way it only does after the drip alarms have been silenced for the third time. Mrs Okafor in bed four has stopped asking for her husband, which is either progress or the morphine. I have two watches on the desk in front of me, my grandfather's and the one Dad left, and I keep checking one against the other because the ward clock above the nurses' station runs four minutes fast and nobody will fix it.

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Grandad's watch is a silver hunter with a cracked crystal, and he wore it on a looped chain through his waistcoat for sixty years. Dad's is gold-plated and stopped at twenty past nine on the morning he died. We never wound it again because Mum said it was the only honest thing left in the house. Between them sit two roses she cut from the garden in June, gone brown at the edges now, the way roses do once they have given everything they meant to give.

At ten past three the lift doors opened and Sister Adeyemi came down the corridor with a paper cup of tea she didn't drink. She perched on the trolley and asked me the time. I said ten past three. She said her Papa always told her the working watch was the liar, and the stopped one was only right twice a day. I laughed, and it was the first time I had laughed on this shift.

I wound Grandad's watch, which takes forty turns, and set it by the ward clock. Then I turned the ward clock back four minutes with a biro, because somebody should. At half five the first birds started on the car park lamps, and I wrote the time on the back of the rota in ink, so it would stay.