Neo-traditional tattoo of three red roses, a grey pocket watch and a hanging chain on a calf.

Roses and pocket watch on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Three red roses with purple-tinged shading sit above a grey pocket watch with its lid open and a long chain looping down the leg. Bold black outlines frame the flowers, leaves and watch, with smooth grey shading on the metal and soft shadows behind the design. Loose red petals scatter around the composition, and the colour is concentrated in the roses against a neutral grey background.

Neo-trad Calf Rose Pocket watch Chain Clock Petal Leaves

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

The watch had stopped at twenty past four, and Mrs Ada Brierley would not let anyone touch it. Her son wanted it cleaned and sold before the damp got into the case. The clockmaker in Skipton had offered eleven pounds and a cup of tea. She kept it on the windowsill in the back kitchen, lid open, chain hanging over the sill like a bell rope, and every morning she watered the three red roses growing against the wall beneath it.

Keep reading

The roses had come from a cutting her husband, Walter, took from the vicarage hedge the spring they married. He had told her the bush was older than the church and would outlast them both, which she had taken as a kindness and later as a threat. He was a signalman on the Leeds line. He kept his own watch beside the lever frame so he would know when the goods was due, and in thirty-one years he was never once late to a shift.

On the Tuesday the wind came off the moor and blew the petals across the yard in little red commas. Ada gathered them into her apron and found, tucked among them, a folded excursion ticket to Scarborough dated the summer before he died. She had never known he kept it. She sat on the step with the chain looped round her fingers and wound the watch for the first time in eleven months. It ticked, uncertain, then steady, and she set the hands to the true time.

Then she walked down to the lane and waited. She did not expect him. She only wanted the petals to know the hour had changed, and the roses, which had never needed a clock, seemed to lean a little towards the gate as if they too had been keeping time.