Black and grey tattoo of two roses, a pocket watch and a hummingbird on the outer thigh, with a banner reading Time Heals Nothing.

Roses, watch and hummingbird on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo runs down the outer thigh, showing two roses, a pocket watch with a banner reading TIME HEALS NOTHING, leaves and a hummingbird in flight. The linework is bold, with soft greyscale shading in the petals and watch face. The black and white photograph is cropped to the tattoo, with a patterned fabric edge at the top.

Traditional Thigh Rose Pocket watch Banner Text Hummingbird 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 stopped again on a Tuesday, halfway through the 4.10 out of Carrow Junction, and Tomas Vell knew before he looked at it. He had carried the silver watch for thirty-one years, since the morning an engraver in Leeds cut two roses into its lid and a ribbon beneath them. The words on the ribbon were his wife's joke. She had said time heals nothing, it only teaches you to carry the thing differently, and the engraver laughed and charged her extra for the capitals.

Keep reading

The hummingbird came in October, when the platform roses had already gone to hips. Ada, his daughter, found it wedged against the signal box window, too cold to fly. She warmed it in her cupped hands, fed it sugar water from the lid of a jam jar, and set it on the bench beside the timetable. By evening it had its strength back and was hovering at the watch on its chain, wings a blur, and the hands jerked and began to move.

Ada asked why. Tomas said the watch had never been stopped by anything but grief, and grief is slow to leave a man, but a small bright thing that wants nothing from you can shake it loose. He did not believe it. He wrote it in the station log anyway, between the coal delivery and a late parcel, the way his father had recorded the weather.

In spring the bird flew off over the goods yard and did not come back. The watch kept good time all summer. Tomas wound it each night before the last train, and when Ada asked whether he missed the bird, he held the watch to his ear and said he could hear it ticking, which was not the same thing, and they both knew it.