Traditional style tattoo of two red roses with green leaves and a grey pocket watch with Roman numerals, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and pocket watch on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two red roses with green leaves frame a grey pocket watch with Roman numerals and a hand at the centre. The roses are filled with solid red and pink, while the watch face uses soft grey shading, and black outlines run throughout. The tattoo sits vertically on a forearm against a tiled floor and a patterned fabric.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Rose Pocket watch Clock Roman numeral Leaves Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pocket watch came out of the briars at the bottom of Hollin Lane the week the mill wheel seized. Nobody in Lower Ashby would own it, and its chain was still looped through the rose hedge as if someone had been reaching for it when the thorns closed in. I carried it home in my apron pocket and set it on the kitchen table beside the bread. My grandmother picked it up, turned it over twice, and said the hands had stopped at a quarter to twelve, the hour the old forest bell had rung the last time anyone walked out past the stile.

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I spent three evenings at my grandfather's bench in the shed, a lamp pulled close and a pin of oiled wire in my fingers. The Roman numerals were worn to ghosts under the glass, and the hour hand shivered when I breathed on it but would not go round. On the fourth evening I gave up and walked the path to the forest edge with the watch in my fist, the lane dark and smelling of wet leaves. The roses there were red as a struck match, heavy-headed, their leaves the dark green of deep water.

A woman stood among them in a grey coat, snipping stems with shears that had gone bright at the joints. She did not look surprised to see me. She said her brother had carried that watch for thirty years and had set off to meet her one winter at a quarter to twelve, and that she had been waiting at the stile ever since for the hands to come round. I opened my palm. She took the watch, wound the crown once, and the second hand ran.

The roses shed their petals in a single ring around her boots, and when I looked back at the village the church clock was striking twelve, a full hour after the hour should have come. She pressed the chain into my palm, its links cold and beaded with dew, and walked back into the thorns without looking round. When I reached the kitchen the bread had gone hard as slate, and the clock on the wall, which had never once kept true, was ticking at last.