Close-up photo of a photorealistic colour tattoo of a gold pocket watch with Roman numerals and a beaded chain, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic pocket watch and chain tattoo

Realism · Colour · Photo

A close-up of a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a small subdial and a beaded chain trailing across the lower edge of the frame. The watch case, chain and dial are rendered with smooth shading, fine highlights and soft shadows that give a strong sense of depth. Warm gold and brown tones dominate, with a pale pink-white dial and a dark background that sits behind the watch.

Realism Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch comes across the counter still ticking, and that is the first thing you hold against it. Mr Okonedo's shop on Warstone Lane has no use for things that keep honest time. You weigh it in your palm, feel the gold worn brown at the hinge, and tilt the dial under the lamp to read the Roman numerals, one of which has been crowded too close to its neighbour, as if the maker had been in a hurry.

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The customer is a young man with a cough and a clean collar, and he will not look at the dial. He asks for four shillings. You offer two and a line in the ledger. He says the chain was his father's, that the watch lost a minute a day in winter and gained two in summer, and that it was never once wrong about when his father would come up the lane at the end of a shift. You write nothing. You open the back of the case instead and find the little subdial still counting its stubborn seconds, and a scrap of paper folded behind the movement.

The pencil says, Wind it Thursdays. Keep the hour for me. The hand is the one that filled in the wage book at the foundry last spring, the one that always left the final figure a little too large. You look up, but the young man has already gone, the door bell still swinging.

On Thursday you wind it, as instructed, and set the hour by the church clock. The chain lies coiled on the counter, beads catching the light, and you find you cannot bring yourself to sell it.