Black ink line drawing of roses, leaves and a pocket watch with a beaded chain, a flash design for a traditional style tattoo.

Roses and pocket watch line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink line drawing on white paper shows three roses with layered petals, a cluster of leaves and a pocket watch with a numbered dial and hands. A beaded chain loops from the watch and ends in a bar at the bottom of the composition. The linework is clean and uniform with no shading or fill, and the design is arranged as a compact bouquet-style motif.

Traditional Rose Pocket watch Clock Leaves Chain Bead

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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 prior's watch came to me on a Tuesday, still warm from the pocket of his habit, its silver chain tangled in jet beads that someone had threaded years ago, back when the brothers still made their own rosaries. Brother Edwin had never let it run slow. Every morning before lauds he thumbed open the case, checked it against the sundial by the south door, and sighed at whatever he found.

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The roses were his doing too. He grew three bushes against the infirmary wall, pruned them hard in February, washed the greenfly off with soapy water in May, and each June he cut the best bloom for the altar and left the rest to the wasps. I inherited the watch and the roses in the same week, and I was no good at either. The dial kept its own counsel and the roses sulked under my hands until Sister Agnes from the village told me to stop fussing and let them be.

It was the hands that gave the secret away. Tucked under the lid, where the hinge had worn thin, I found a slip of paper folded small in Edwin's cramped script. It said the watch had been wrong on purpose for forty years, fast by eleven minutes, so that whoever wound it would always be a little early for the next thing. He had wanted someone to arrive before they were needed.

I did not set it right. I wound it that evening, left it eleven minutes ahead of the sundial, and walked out to the wall. One white rose had opened early, so I cut it and carried it into the church, where the bell had not yet begun to ring.