Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a heart-shaped ribcage, a pocket watch with Roman numerals, sprigs of flowers and the script words Your love will be safe with me.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ribcage heart with pocket watch design

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a tattoo design shows a ribcage arranged in a heart shape, with a pocket watch with Roman numerals at its centre and a sprig of small flowers rising from the top. A beaded chain hangs from the watch and loops across the lower part of the design, and a script line of text sits beneath it. The linework is fine and grey, with soft hatched shading on the bones and the watch face, and the image is in black and grey on a plain light background.

Ribcage Heart Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Flower Chain Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's widow kept the shop on Tanner's Row long after the sign had faded, and every evening at nine she wound the great clock in the window by hand, though nobody had asked her to. Her son Edwin came up from the coast to help her sell the stock. He found the bench covered in watch movements laid out like the bones of small animals, and in a drawer a pocket watch with its case open, its face cracked across the Roman numerals at the four o'clock mark.

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"Your father fixed everything that came through that door," she said, "except the one thing he was asked to keep." She explained that a woman had once brought him a watch to mend, a gift from a man who had gone to sea and not come back. The woman wanted the hands stopped at the hour he had left. Her husband refused to stop a thing that was meant to run, so he kept it running for her, every day, for thirty years, and she came every Thursday to hear it tick.

Edwin took the watch to the window and held it against the light. Behind the cracked glass, someone had pressed a sprig of forget-me-nots between the crystal and the dial, flattened and gone the colour of weak tea. Beneath it, on the back plate, was scratched a single line in a careful hand: your love will be safe with me.

He carried it out to the Row that evening and found the woman sitting on the bench outside the shop, a beaded chain looped through her fingers. She did not ask for the watch. She only nodded at the clock in the window and said it had struck nine a minute late, which was how he knew she had been listening all along.