Realistic tattoo of two red roses and a blue-faced pocket watch with Roman numerals on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses and pocket watch on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two red roses with green leaves surrounding a pocket watch with a silver case, a blue dial and Roman numerals. The rose petals and watch case are rendered with smooth shading and highlights, giving a three-dimensional look. The colours are vivid against the skin, and the design is arranged diagonally across the upper back, with one rose at the top right and the other at the lower left.

Realism Back Rose Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Hollin's Travelling Circus had stood in the same Bedfordshire field for nine summers, and every summer there were fewer people in the stands. Old Mabry Tull, who kept the ticket box, said the trouble was that nobody had time any more. Folk wanted their entertainment on a screen, not held up in a tent until the ringmaster decided it was half past eight.

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The ringmaster, Ansel Crewe, carried his father's pocket watch in his waistcoat. It had a silver case, a blue enamel face and Roman numerals worn nearly smooth by a lifetime of thumbs. One evening in September it stopped at a quarter past nine and would not start again. He took it to a mender in Luton, who held it to the lamp, said the works were sound, and asked six pounds for the look.

Ansel had six pence and a hole in his boot. So he went round behind the caravans to where Nell Sowerby, who fed the horses, grew roses in old paint tins, because roses were the one thing nobody would sell for scrap. He asked for two. She cut them without a word, bound the stems with twine, and said a clock wanted feeding as much as a horse did.

That night he laid one rose on the sawdust beside the watch and the other on the ring rail, and waited. Nobody came, as nobody had come for weeks, but at first light the watch was ticking on the sawdust, steady as a heartbeat, and the hands had crept round to the correct hour. Mabry Tull swore the petals had opened in the dark. Ansel never asked the mender for his money back. He kept the watch in his coat for the rest of the tour, and told anyone who asked that the roses had done the work.