Forearm tattoo with red and orange roses, two small birds, script reading Time Heals Everything and a black and grey pocket watch.

Roses, birds and pocket watch on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with two large red and orange roses, a smaller rose near the wrist, and two small birds perched on thin branches. Script reading Time Heals Everything sits between the flowers, and a black and grey pocket watch with Roman numerals runs down the lower arm. Bold outlines and solid shading give the roses a traditional look, while the watch is rendered in greys.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Rose Bird Pocket watch Clock Script Branch Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you. The wind off the firth likes to come through the arrow slits and steal your warmth. This is the tale of Hester Maddox, who kept the gatehouse clock at Carrick Mere when there was still a roof over it. Every Sunday she climbed the seventy-one steps with a chamois cloth in her apron pocket and a tin of oil, and every Sunday the great brass face blinked back at her with its Roman numerals worn to ghosts.

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Her brother Tom had gone to the Somme with a silver pocket watch his father left him. In the spring a letter came with only the watch inside it, the glass cracked straight across the twelve. Hester would not have it mended. She set it on the windowsill beside the rose her mother had planted against the south wall, and there it sat while the bush climbed over the sill and two sparrows nested in the honeysuckle below. She told the sparrows the news each morning. They were poor listeners, but they were never late.

The old men in the village said she was mad to talk to birds, and she let them say it. Then one January the gatehouse clock stopped dead at a quarter past four, and nobody in the valley could coax it back. Hester took the watch down, prised its back open with a hairpin, and found the mainspring coiled tight and patient under the grime, exactly as Tom had left it. She wound it, held it ticking in her palm, and laughed until the sparrows fled.

She carved the words above the gatehouse door herself, letter by letter, and the rain has not worn them away yet. Mind the step on the stairs, children. Time heals everything, the saying goes, though it never tells you how much of the healing is done with a hairpin and a cloth.