Close view of a red rose and a clock face tattoo on the upper thigh of a person lying on a bed, wearing a daisy-print top and black tights.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and pocket watch on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A person lies on white bedding with their legs raised, showing a tattoo on the upper thigh. The tattoo combines a red rose with a clock face showing Roman numerals, with some dark line work and grey shading around the watch case. Colour is limited to the red petals, with the rest of the design in black and grey, and the shot is taken at an angle with the rest of the body cropped out.

Thigh Rose Clock Pocket watch Roman numeral Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's gone low and I'll not be shouting over the wind. You want the one about Mrs Pellow's clock? Everyone on this front has heard it wrong, so hush and I'll give it you right.

Keep reading

The Gull's Rest stood three doors up from the harbour wall, and it kept a pocket watch on the hall table that belonged to nobody. Brass, cracked at the glass, Roman numerals worn to ghosts. Every lodger who came up the steps asked whose it was, and every one got a different answer from Mrs Pellow, who ran the place with a ledger and a red rose pinned to her cardigan. She said it was her husband's, lost at sea. Then she said it was her father's, lost at cards. The third week of October she said it had never been wound since the year the pier burned, and that was the only true thing she ever told anybody.

Then a young man came off the Tuesday boat with a cardboard case and a face like he'd been seasick since Lowestoft. He picked the watch up off the table, turned it over, and found a name scratched inside the lid. Not hers. His grandmother's. He stood in that hall with the thing ticking, because after forty years of silence it had started, and nobody in the house could say who had wound it.

Mrs Pellow came down the stairs in her slippers and took it from him gently, the way you'd take a bird from a cat. She opened the case and there was a dried rose petal folded under the face, still red as the day it was pressed. She said nothing. She just put the watch back in his palm and climbed up to bed. And the watch kept going, and the hour it struck was the hour he'd been born.