Black and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing roses, a pocket watch, a jewelled rosary with a cross and two doves.

Rose, pocket watch and rosary forearm sleeve

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three side-by-side photographs show a sleeve tattoo on a forearm. Shaded roses, a pocket watch with a visible dial and a beaded rosary with a cross are rendered in black and grey with smooth gradients. Two doves in flight and partly visible script lettering sit around the arm, with the design wrapping across the skin.

Realism Forearm Rose Pocket watch Rosary Cross Dove Bird Script Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad's pocket watch stopped at twenty past four on the morning the coal train came off the Hebden line, and nobody in Thornley Cross had the heart to tell him it was only the spring. He kept it on the dresser under the Sacred Heart calendar with the lid shut, as if the time might be shut in with it.

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Mam's rosary hung on the nail beside the clock. She had said the decades on it every night since the war, the wooden beads worn pale where her thumb went. When she died in the February of '56, I found it knotted in the drawer with the rent book, and I took it to Ruth Ashworth, who did the flowers for St Anne's and could mend anything with a fine needle.

Ruth talked while she worked, about her brother in Ontario, the price of dripping, the Corporation men digging up Chapel Street again. She never asked what I wanted. She threaded the broken links, slid a new silver cross onto the end, and said, "Doves, to go with it. Your mother would have liked doves." I didn't argue. I didn't have an argument left.

On the Saturday of the Whit walks I stood at the back of the church with the watch in one pocket and the beads in the other. When the bell rang the hour, I took the watch out, pressed the crown, and felt it catch. It was a minute slow and it ticked against my palm like something that had decided to keep going.