Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with two shaded roses, a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a ribbon banner, in neo-traditional style.

Roses and pocket watch design with banner

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing two open roses framing a pocket watch with Roman numerals, with leaves and a blank ribbon banner across the lower part. The linework is clean and the rose petals and watch casing are shaded with soft grey tones and fine hatching. The composition is a central watch with the roses balanced on either side and the banner sweeping beneath, on a pale background.

Neo-trad Rose Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Banner Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Hollin Cross kept his pocket watch on a chain and set every clock on the line by it, so the 4.10 never left early, not even the winter the beck came over the platform and drowned the signal lamps. Men said the watch had been his grandfather's, and that its hands ran a minute slow for every person who had ever stood on the down side and not gone home.

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Each evening a girl called Nell Garrow came along the cinder path with two roses cut from the hedge at Chapel Lane and laid them on the bench under the clock. She never bought a ticket. She asked when the 4.10 would come for her, and he told her the same thing every time, that it was not yet her train. She asked how she would know it. He said she would know by the roses, because a train for the living always had its windows open and its driver would lift a hand to anyone on the platform who had flowers.

One November she stopped coming, and the roses stopped with her. The stationmaster, old by then with a bad hip, took the watch out one evening and found its hands had gone round a full hour backwards. He sat on the bench with the chain in his fist until the lamps were lit. In the morning he sent to the drapers in Settle for a length of wide cream ribbon, the kind used for funerals and weddings, and he laid it under two roses where a name should go.

He never wrote anything on it. When people asked, he said a name written on a station is a name somebody has to call out, and he had called out enough. The 4.10 still leaves on time. On dusk evenings, when the hedge is in flower, the watch ticks a little slower than the rest of the line, and the driver lifts his hand to the empty bench all the same.