Realistic colour tattoo on a woman's upper back showing pink roses, an anatomical heart, a pocket watch and blue-grey butterfly wings with gears.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses, heart and pocket watch on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the upper back and reaches toward the left shoulder, showing pink roses, a red anatomical heart and a pocket watch with Roman numerals. Pale blue-grey butterfly wings and brass-toned gears and chains frame the central heart and watch. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft highlights on the petals and metal, and the design is arranged symmetrically across the back.

Realism Back Shoulder Rose Heart Pocket watch Butterfly Gear Chain Clock

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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 tide has already crept over the causeway by the time you reach the last stone, so you take off your boots, tie the laces together and carry them up the slope with the pocket watch knocking against your ribs on its chain. Nobody on Scarrow comes across the sea wall in a hurry. The rest of the island learnt long ago to wait on the water.

Keep reading

Mrs Penhale keeps her workshop above the harbour, where the gears of a dozen clocks tick out of step with one another and a bush of pink roses grows through a broken pane. She puts the watch in your palm without a word. It belonged to her husband, who went down off the Carrack Rock in the winter of the big storm, and it stopped at twenty past four on the morning they found his boat. She has never opened it. She says you have steady hands, which is why she sent for you and not the ferryman.

Inside the case, behind the face with its Roman numerals, you find a moth's wing pressed flat and a curl of paper no bigger than a fingernail. It says only: wind me for the turn. You open the back and see a small heart of red enamel, cracked along one edge, and beside it a spring wound tight by someone who knew exactly how long a man might be out on the water. You fit the wing back in its place, set the hands to the hour the tide turns, and begin to wind.

The moth lifts off the windowsill as the second hand starts its climb. It circles the roses once and goes out over the sea wall, pale as a rinsed sail, down toward the causeway where the water has begun, very slowly, to draw back. Behind you Mrs Penhale says nothing at all. Out on the rocks a bell starts to ring, and the sea, which has kept its hold on Scarrow all afternoon, begins to let go.