Black and grey realism tattoo of two roses and a pocket watch with Roman numerals on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and pocket watch on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black and grey tattoo on a forearm, showing two roses and an open-faced pocket watch with Roman numerals on its dial. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients across the petals and metallic highlights on the watch case. The arm rests on a white towel against a dark background, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Realism Forearm Rose Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch comes across the counter still warm from someone's pocket, and that is the first thing you notice and the last thing you should trust. It is past eleven on a Thursday, the shutter is halfway down on Carver Street, and the man who sets it on the glass keeps his hand over it as if it might change its mind.

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You open the case with your thumbnail. The dial is cream gone the colour of old piano keys, Roman numerals inked black and careful, and the hands have stopped at twenty to four. Someone has scratched a pair of initials on the back, E.M., and below them a small rose with too many petals, drawn by a person who had only ever seen one in a window. The man says it was his grandmother's. He says it the way people repeat a thing until it sounds true.

In the back room, under the anglepoise, you give it a turn of the crown. It catches, then runs, a tick like a fingernail on a tabletop. Tucked behind the movement is a pressed rose, flattened to paper and brown at the edges, and you remember the ledger on the shelf upstairs, forty years of pledges, each with a time written beside it in a hand that stopped when the shop changed hands. You check the book. Twenty to four, the same date, the same initials. Nobody has ever said what happened at twenty to four.

You write the ticket, fifty pounds, thirty days, and slide the watch into the drawer face up so it can keep time for whoever comes back. Outside the rain has started on the shutter, and when you lock up, the clock above the till is running four minutes slow, the way it always has, and you leave it that way.