Realistic pocket watch with a chain and a poppy flower on a forearm, shaded in black and grey with small gold accents.

Realistic pocket watch and poppy on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large pocket watch sits across the inner forearm, its white face marked with Roman numerals and its movement visible through an open back. A silver chain loops from the watch, and a second flower and a shaded pocket fob or cloth form the surrounding composition. The work uses smooth, detailed shading and soft smoky grey backgrounds, with yellow-gold touches on the watch hands, rim and flower centres.

Realism Botanical Forearm Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Chain Flower Poppy Smoke Gear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Keel had kept the signal box at Hartsmoor Gap for nineteen winters, and in all that time he had never once been late with the lamp. The pass was a crooked cut through the shoulder of the fell, and the wind came down it like a dog let off its chain. His father's pocket watch hung from his waistcoat on a length of silver chain, its face gone the colour of old teeth, and he checked it against the sky every quarter hour.

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In June the poppies came up along the cutting, thin red things the wind bent flat and then let go. Mrs Abernathy from the inn brought him tea each morning and complained that he wasted his eyes on the rails. "The rails aren't going anywhere," she said. He told her that was rather the point of rails. She laughed, and then the cloud came down off the top of the fell and swallowed the box whole.

The night the slip came, the watch stopped at twenty to three. He held it to his ear and heard nothing but rain on the glass and, far below, the grind of stones. He knew the timetable by heart. The Thursday goods would reach the viaduct in eleven minutes. He wound the crown until his thumb ached, then struck a match and read the hour from the shadow of the levers on the wall, the old trick his father had taught him on the first line.

He set the hands by match-light, lamp swinging red, and hauled the signal up. The driver saw it, sounded the whistle twice and stopped with a hundred yards to spare. By morning the poppies lay torn across the ballast, bright as spilt coins, and Tomas sat on the step and let the watch tick in his palm, steady as a pulse.