Black and grey tattoos on two forearms, showing a shaded rose and leaves on the left arm and a banner, snake and skull on the right forearm.

Rose and banner lettering on forearms

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with black and grey tattoos. The left arm has a large shaded rose with leaves and stippled dots, while the right forearm has a banner with partly visible lettering, a skull and a snake. The fine shading and soft grey tones are set against a speckled floor, with a gold watch on the wrist.

Realism Traditional Forearm Rose Leaves Banner Lettering Skull Snake Pocket watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch came across my counter on a Tuesday, wrapped in a handkerchief that still smelt of tobacco, and the man who brought it would not say whose it had been. Forty years I have kept the shop on Silvergate, and I know the look of a thing carried too long in one pocket. The case was worn to brass at the hinge. Inside the lid someone had scratched a rose, its petals crowded and clumsy, and beneath it a line of letters I could not read without my lamp.

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I cleaned it over three nights. Dust came out of the movement like sand from a boot, and the hands began to tick again on the fourth morning, a little fast. My apprentice Ada asked why I didn't sell it to the dealer in Whitefriargate, who buys anything with a silver face. I told her the watch was not mine to sell. On the back plate was a skull grinning beneath a snake that had swallowed its own tail, and I have never trusted a thing that wants to be finished and starting again at once.

The banner round the lid had lost most of its words to time. I made out STRO, and then KEEP, which I took for an instruction rather than a name. On the fifth night I found a folded slip tucked behind the mainspring: a pawn ticket from 1911, made out to a man who had left the watch against a debt of two shillings and never come back for it.

I went to the dealer after all, only to ask what he would give. Nothing, he said, for a watch with a debt still on it. So it stays on my counter, where I wind it each morning and listen to it tick away the hours somebody once owed.