Black line drawing of a tattoo design with poppies, a bird with shaded wings, a pocket watch and a key, shown as a sketch on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppies, bird and clock design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows two poppy flowers, a chrysanthemum-like bloom, a bird with outstretched shaded wings, an oval frame, a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a key hanging from a strand of beads. The linework is dark and even, with soft grey shading on the bird and petals. The composition is centred, with the flowers framing the bird and watch on a light background.

Botanical Neo-trad Poppy Flower Chrysanthemum Bird Clock Pocket watch Key Bead Frame

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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

Nell Harker found the pocket watch in the bottom of the feed bin, wrapped in a seed sack gone stiff with damp. The glass was cracked across the three o'clock and the hands had stopped at twenty past six, which her father always said was when the milk lorry used to come. It was the second week of January, the ewes were heavy, and she had no time for sentiment, so she pushed the watch into her coat and went out into the yard.

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The shed smelled of diesel and wet straw. Under a tarpaulin behind the tractor sat the wooden box her mother had called the good things: a string of jet beads, a tin of poppy heads dried brown as biscuits, and a small brass key with no lock to match it. Every summer her mother had grown poppies along the lane, a red so loud the bees went mad for it, and she had pressed them between the pages of the almanac until the book swelled like bread. Nell sat on an upturned bucket and turned the key over in her fingers.

Lambing started at two in the morning. By four she had a ewe down on the straw under the lamp, a lamb's nose showing and no progress, and the watch was ticking against her ribs where she had forgotten it. She heard it over the ewe's grunting, a small stubborn sound, and realised it was going again. The crack had not stopped it. Someone had wound it the night before her father went into hospital, and nobody had thought to look.

When the lamb was up and sucking, she took the watch out in the grey light and held it beside the key. She threaded the key onto the beads, hung them on the nail by the byre door where the lambing book lived, and left the watch running in her pocket for once, letting it keep whatever time it liked.