Pencil sketch of a neo-traditional tattoo design with two roses, a pocket watch, a butterfly and a strand of beads, drawn on paper with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, pocket watch and butterfly design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink outline drawing of a tattoo design on paper, showing two open roses, a pocket watch with Roman numerals, a butterfly and a looping strand of beads. The linework is bold and clean with leaves and petals shaded in fine hatching, and the composition is arranged diagonally across the sheet. The drawing is in greyscale with no colour.

Neo-trad Rose Pocket watch Butterfly Bead Leaves Clock Sketch

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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

The watch has stopped at twenty to four, the way it does whenever the tide turns the wrong side of the pier, and Mrs Hollis taps the glass with one fingernail as if it might be persuaded. You set the tray of cold toast down on the hall table and wait. She does not look at you. She looks at the front window, where the sea wind pushes through the sash and makes the painted butterfly on the wallpaper lift and settle, lift and settle.

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Her husband Arthur kept every clock in the house wound for thirty-one years, and the pocket watch was his: a dull silver case with the lid worn smooth at the hinge and two dried roses pressed flat inside the cover. Nobody has opened it since the funeral. You know this because you carried the box down from the attic yourself, and it rattled the whole way like something wanting to be let out.

You open the case with a hairpin, the way Arthur showed you on your first wet afternoon here, and the roses crumble brown against your palm. Under them a string of small glass beads has been threaded through the hinge, and tucked beside it is a slip of paper in a looping hand: Wind me Sundays, love, or I'll lose the hour.

On Sunday you wind it in the scullery while the kettle grumbles and the gulls fight over the bins. The second hand jerks, catches, and goes round. Mrs Hollis hears the tick from the parlour and comes to stand in the doorway, and for once she does not tell you what to do next.