Colour traditional tattoo of a red rose, green leaves and an open pocket watch with a dotted chain, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and pocket watch tattoo

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A red rose with shaded pink petals and green leaves sits on the left, with a pocket watch showing Roman numerals on the right. A dotted chain of small red and black beads loops above and below the design. Bold black outlines define the forms, and the rose and watch are filled with solid colour and soft shading on lighter skin.

Traditional Rose Pocket watch Clock Leaves Dot Chain

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

Every evening at dusk old Tam Heskett climbed the stair of Carrow Gatehouse with the key in his teeth, because the lord who built the place had left one rule behind him: the watch on the iron nail must be wound before the bell at Sallow Ford stopped ringing. Nobody in the valley remembered the lord's face. They remembered the watch, a silver thing as big as a bread cob, its numbers worn soft as sugar.

Keep reading

The rule was kept until the winter Tam's knees gave out and his grandson Will took the stair instead. Will was nine and wanted to know what happened if the watch ran down. His grandmother said the castle would forget the road home, and the roses would climb over the gate and keep everyone in or out, depending on which side they were standing. Will laughed, then wound it anyway, and found a second key tucked under the face, small and brass, that fitted no lock he could see.

He carried it down past the ruined chapel, where the roses had already crowded the window arches, red as cut cloth. His grandmother took the little key and turned it in the cottage door. The wood gave like wet bread, and behind it lay a warm kitchen with a kettle on the hob that had been waiting three hundred years.

Will keeps the key now. He says the roses always open at two o'clock, and he has never once been late with the winding.